When the Women’s Rugby World Cup kicks off this weekend, spectators will witness more than the usual thrills, skills and physical brilliance the code delivers – they’ll also see something completely novel: flashing mouthguards.

Designed to help keep professional players safer, these smart mouthguards flash when a player experiences a collision big enough to potentially result in a concussion. This is an advance on existing instrumented mouthguards, used in the professional game since the 2023 men’s Rugby World Cup.

The mouthguards contain accelerometers and a gyroscope to measure the size of collisions. If a collision exceeds the threshold for a head injury assessment, a light-emitting diode (LED) will flash red, alerting the player and officials.

The smart mouthguards can measure collision impact forces, the direction of the impact and the number of collisions for any player during a game.

Collision impact is measured in “peak linear acceleration” (the g-force) and “peak rotational acceleration”. Based on the data, a decision can be made to pull a player from the game for a head injury assessment.

The threshold for male players is a g-force of 75 and for female players 65. But problems with Bluetooth capability meant there could be delays between a player receiving a head knock and the data being downloaded. The new flashing mouthguards are designed to overcome this delay.

A head injury assessment is done off-field by a trained medical professional. Background is collected about the collision and the player’s symptoms. The player then completes memory and balance tests. If they fail the assessment they’re out for the rest of the game.

World Rugby is using the women’s World Cup tournament to introduce the new LED mouthguards, ahead of using them at the top level of the men’s and women’s game in general. In time, we may see them become more common in non-professional and youth grades, too.

What about amateur and junior rugby?

The primary purpose of the new mouthguards is to improve surveillance of likely concussions by reducing the time between a sizeable impact being detected and then reported to officials.

In turn, this may reduce the likelihood of a player experiencing a second large collision – and therefore keep them safer. Like other smart mouthguards, these new ones will also record all collisions in a game for longer-term monitoring.

The high cost of these innovative safety technologies has so far been prohibitive for lower and non-professional leagues. Aside from professional franchises, really only researchers have had access, given the nature of the hardware, software and 3D-printing process involved.

But that might be changing, with recent innovations by mouthguard companies bringing their products into a more viable price range for community rugby.

High quality “boil and bite” instrumented mouthguards currently retail for A$350, which is only about $100 more than a dentist-fitted custom unit. As the technology evolves, the price will no doubt reduce more.

The advantage of smart mouthguards is the objectivity they can bring to collision assessment in community rugby, something not available in the past.

Using a phone app linked to the product, parents, coaches or referees can see the size of impact a player has received in a collision. That then allows them to make a more informed choice about removing a player from the field.

It would also be harder for a player to hide a concussion and therefore likely reduce under-reporting. As well, our research shows concussions for junior players can occur well below the adult thresholds, so this type of technology and information could be very helpful.

Benefits for brain health

While these safety developments are potentially beneficial, junior and community rugby still relies largely on non-medically trained staff to identify possible concussions.

Despite greater awareness and concern about concussions, research indicates there are still many youth athletes and parents who don’t know how to recognise the symptoms. There also appears to be a stigma about concussion reporting.

We know that in New Zealand, Māori and Pasifika players appear to suffer from higher rates of sport-related concussion, but are less aware of and less willing to report symptoms.

Under-diagnosis and under-reporting can have significant repercussions for the future brain health of players – particularly children whose developing brains are more susceptible to the effects of concussion.

An early return to play following an unreported concussion can lead to a player suffering a second and worse concussion, which could have longer-term recovery implications for a young person.

Improved coach awareness is one area that would make a big difference, and there are already concussion recognition courses available such as RugbySmart in New Zealand and BokSmart in South Africa.

The flashing mouthguards on show at the Women’s Rugby World Cup can’t prevent concussions. But they represent another step towards better managing the risks and effects of concussions over a player’s season and career.

As prices drop and these technologies become more accessible, we will likely see greater uptake in community rugby, further improving player safety at the grassroots level.

The authors thank George Stilwell, Natalia Kabaliuk and Keith Alexander from the University of Canterbury for their contribution to this article.

Nick Draper, Professor of Sport and Exercise Science, University of Canterbury and Kevin Mangan, PhD Candidate in Exercise Science, University of Canterbury

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

Some of the most enduring ancient myths in the Persian world were centred around gardens of almost unimaginable beauty and opulence.

The biblical Garden of Eden and the Epic of Gilgamesh’s Garden of the Gods are prominent examples. In these myths, paradise was an opulent garden of tranquillity and abundance.

But how did this concept of paradise originate? And what did these beautiful gardens look and feel like in antiquity?

Pairi-daēza is where we get the word ‘paradise’

The English word “paradise” derives from an old Persian word pairidaeza or pairi-daēza, which translates as “enclosed garden”.

The origins of paradise gardens lie in Mesopotamia and Persia (modern Iraq and Iran).

The Garden of the Gods from the Epic of Gilgamesh from about 2000 BCE is one of the earliest attested in literature.

Some argue it was also the inspiration for the legend of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis. In both of these stories, paradise gardens functioned as a type of utopia.

When the Achaemenid kings ruled ancient Persia (550–330 BCE), the development of royal paradise gardens grew significantly. The paradise garden of the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, who ruled around 550 BCE, is the earliest physical example yet discovered.

During his reign, Cyrus built a palace complex at Pasargadae in Persia. The entire complex was adorned with gardens which included canals, bridges, pathways and a large pool.

One of the gardens measured 150 metres by 120 metres (1.8 hectares). Archaeologists found evidence for the garden’s division into four parts, symbolising the four quarters of Cyrus’s vast empire.

Technological wonders

A feature of paradise gardens in Persia was their defiance of often harsh, dry landscapes.

This required ingenuity in supplying large volumes of water required for the gardens. Pasargadae was supplied by a sophisticated hydraulic system, which diverted water from the nearby Pulvar River.

The tradition continued throughout the Achaemenid period. Cyrus the Younger, probably a descendant of Cyrus the Great, had a palace at Sardis (in modern Turkey), which included a paradise garden.

According to the ancient Greek writer, Xenophon, the Spartan general Lysander visited Cyrus at the palace around 407 BCE.

When he walked in the garden, astounded by its intricate design and beauty, Lysander asked who planned it. Cyrus replied that he had designed the garden himself and planted its trees.

Perhaps the ultimate ancient paradise garden was the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

In one tradition, the gardens were built by the neo-Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BCE).

The gardens were so magnificent and technologically advanced they were later counted among the Seven Wonders of the World.

In a later Roman account, the Hanging Gardens consisted of vaulted terraces resting on cube-shaped pillars.

Flowing water was a key feature, with elaborate machines raising water from the Euphrates river. Fully grown trees with vast root systems were supported by the terraces.

In another account, the Hanging Gardens were built by a Syrian king for his Persian wife to remind her of her homeland.

When the Sasanian dynasty (224–651 CE) came to power in Persia, its kings also built paradise gardens. The 147-hectare palace of Khosrow II (590–628 CE) at Qasr-e Shirin was almost entirely set in a paradise garden.

The paradise gardens were rich in symbolic significance. Their division into four parts symbolised imperial power, the cardinal directions and the four elements in Zoroastrian lore: air, earth, water and fire.

The gardens also played a religious role, offering a glimpse of what eternity might look like in the afterlife.

They were also a refuge in the midst of a harsh world and unforgiving environments. Gilgamesh sought solace and immortality in the Garden of the Gods following the death of his friend Enkidu.

According to the Bible, God himself walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening.

But in both cases, disappointment and distress followed.

Gilgamesh discovered the non-existence of immortality. God discovered the sin of Adam and Eve.

Paradise on Earth

The tradition of paradise gardens continued after the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century CE.

The four-part gardens (known as chahar-bagh) of the Persian kingdoms were also a key feature of the Islamic period.

The Garden of Paradise described in the Quran comprised four gardens divided into two pairs. The four-part garden became symbolic of paradise on Earth.

The tradition of paradise gardens has continued in Iran to the present day.

Nine paradise gardens in Iran are collectively listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Eram garden, built in about the 12th century CE, and the 19th-century Bagh-e Shahzadeh are among the most splendid.

Today, the word “paradise” evokes a broader range of images and experiences. It can foster many different images of idyllic physical and spiritual settings.

But the magnificent enclosed gardens of the ancient Persian world still inspire us to imagine what paradise on Earth might look and feel like.

Peter Edwell, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Macquarie University

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

New research conducted at Walufeni Cave, an important archaeological site in Papua New Guinea, reveals new evidence of long-distance interactions between Oceania’s Indigenous societies, as far back as 3,200 years ago.

Our new study, published in the journal Australian Archaeology, is the first archaeological research undertaken on the Great Papuan Plateau. The findings continue to undermine the historical Eurocentric idea that early Indigenous societies in this region were static and unchanging.

Instead, we find further evidence for what Monash Professor of Indigenous Archaeology Ian J. McNiven calls the Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere: a dynamic interchange of trade, ideas and movement over a vast region encompassing New Guinea, the Torres Strait, and north-eastern Australia.

Tracking movement across Sahul

The goal of the Great Papuan Plateau project was to determine whether the plateau may have been an eastern pathway for the movement of early people into north-eastern Australia, at a time when New Guinea and Australia were joined in the continent of Sahul.

The two countries as we know them separated about 8,000 years ago due to sea levels rising after the last glacial period.

Our research in Walufeni Cave, located near Mount Bosavi in New Guinea’s southern highlands province, identified occupation dating back more than 10,000 years. We also found a unique and as yet undated petroglyph rock art style.

Our analyses of cave deposits reveals significant changes in how the site was used starting from just over 3,000 years ago. This includes changes to the frequency of occupation, to plant and animal use, as well as the sudden appearance of coastal marine shell.

Specifically, we found 3,200-year-old evidence for the transport of marine shell 200km inland, which has previously been recorded as coming from the southern coast of the Gulf of Papua, and from as far away as Torres Strait.

This suggests the long-distance maritime trade and interaction networks between the societies of coastal southern New Guinea, Torres Strait and northern Australia extended far inland – and much further than previously known.

The significance of marine shells

Archaeologists and ethnographers have widely documented the use of culturally modified marine shells as important items of trade and prestige in New Guinea.

These shells were used as markers of status and prestige, for ritual purposes, as currency and wealth, as tools, and to facilitate long-distance social ties between groups.

Despite the coastal availability of a large variety of shellfish, only a relatively small selection are recorded as being commonly used in New Guinea.

The most prominent of these are dog whelks (Nassaridae), cowrie shells (Cypraeidae), cone shells (Conidae), baler shell (Volutidae), and pearl/kina shell (Pteriidae). Many of these are significant for ritual and symbolic functions across the Indo-Pacific and indeed, globally.

Dog whelks were the predominant species we found in Walufeni Cave, along with olive shells and cowrie shells. These come from very small “sea snails”, or gastropods.

All of the shells we found had been culturally modified, such as to allow stitching onto garments, or threading onto strings.

Gastropod shells continue to be used by today’s plateau societies. They may be sewn onto elaborate ceremonial costumes, or offered in long strings as trade items, or as bridal dowry.

Pottery and oral tradition

Further evidence for long-distance voyaging between the southern coast of Papua New Guinea and the Torres Strait and Northern Australia comes in the form of pottery.

Researchers have found Lapita pottery at two archaeological sites on the south coast of New Guinea (Caution Bay and Hopo). These have been dated to 2,900 and 2,600 years ago, respectively.

Lapita pottery is a distinctive feature of Austronesian long-distance voyagers with origins in modern-day Taiwan and the Philippines. Lapita peoples bought the first pottery to New Guinea about 3,300 years ago, providing the template for later localised pottery production.

In a separate finding, Aboriginal pottery dating back to 2,950 years ago was reported from Jiigurru (Lizard Island), off the coast of the Cape York Peninsula. While this pottery isn’t stylistically Lapita, the technology used to make it is.

Similar pottery dating back 2,600 years ago has been reported on the eastern Murray Islands of Torres Strait, and in the Mask Cave on Pulu Island, western Torres Strait. Analysis of the Murray Island pottery indicates the clay was derived from southern Papua New Guinea.

These studies suggest the Lapita peoples’ knowledge of how to make pottery spread to Torres Strait and northern Australia via the interaction sphere.

Furthermore, the cultural hero Sido/Souw, who is present in oral tradition on the Great Papuan Plateau, is also present in oral tradition from the Torres Strait and southern New Guinea. This demonstrates sociocultural connections across a vast area.

Our research builds on the continuing reevaluation of the capabilities of Indigenous societies, which were often characterised by early anthropologists as static and unchanging.

Bryce Barker, Professor in Archaeology, University of Southern Queensland and Tiina Manne, Associate professor, The University of Queensland

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

There’s been a lot of buzz online about the August “black moon”, happening later this week.

While you’ve probably heard of a “blue moon” before, this might be the first time you’ve encountered its ominous-sounding counterpart.

You’re not alone. In fact, neither “blue moon” nor “black moon” are astronomical terms. They describe the moments when the lunar calendar and our calendar year fall out of alignment.

So what is a black moon? The current definition has nothing to do with the actual colour of the Moon.

Full moon, half moon, new moon

Let’s start by defining some key lunar terms. The Moon is “full” when its whole face or disc is illuminated by the Sun. We typically get treated to a nice, bright, full moon at night when the Sun and Moon are opposite each other with Earth in-between.

A “new” moon is when none of the Moon’s face is illuminated and the far side is illuminated instead. This happens when the Moon is up during the day, because the “far side” of the Moon is illuminated when the Moon is in-between Earth and the Sun.

A lunar cycle – the time it takes for the Moon to go from new, to full, to new again – is approximately 29.5 days long. Most years there are twelve full moons and twelve new moons.

But the 29.5 day cycle doesn’t fit perfectly into a calendar year, so every now and then there are thirteen full or new moons in a calendar year. Seven years out of every nineteen years will have thirteen full or new moons instead of twelve.

Blue moon, black moon

A blue moon is when we get a thirteenth full moon in one calendar year. Conversely, a black moon is when we get a thirteenth new moon in one calendar year.

Because these terms are entirely colloquial, there are a couple of definitions used for these extra moons. One is based on seasons and the other on simple calendar months.

Seasonal moons

A calendar year has four seasons, divided by equinoxes and solstices (see above).

Each season is roughly three months long and typically has three full moons. Some cultures give each of those seasonal full moons a special name – you’ve likely heard of “wolf moon”, “strawberry moon”, “harvest moon” and others from American folklore, for example.

Every two or three years, however, we get an extra full moon in a season. When that happens, the first, second and fourth full moons keep their usual names while the third one becomes a “blue moon”.

You’d think the idiom “once in a blue moon” comes from this name, but the folklore name is actually relatively recent. In the 16th century, saying the “moon is blue” was more likely a way to refer to something being false or absurd.

Meanwhile, the third new moon in a season with four new moons is a “black moon” – a term than can only be traced to around 2016.

Calendar moons

The other definition for blue and black moons is related to calendar months.

A blue moon is the second of two full moons in one calendar month, while a black moon is the second new moon in a calendar month.

The black moon this month is a seasonal black moon and it’s happening on August 23. The next calendar-month black moon will happen on August 31 2027.

The next seasonal blue moon will be on May 20 2027 and the next calendar-month blue moon will be on May 31 2026.

You can’t see a black moon, but look at the sky anyway

We can’t actually see the black moon. The Moon will be up during the day and the far side of it will be illuminated.

But new moons in general bode well for keen stargazers. The full moon outshines a lot of the night sky, because it’s about 33,000 times brighter than the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. When there’s a new moon, the night sky is nice and dark, giving you more opportunities to see stars and constellations.

During the black moon on August 23 this weekend, the celestial emu or Gugurmin will be beautifully positioned overhead soon after dusk in the southern hemisphere.

If you’re in the southern hemisphere somewhere very dark and free from light pollution, you’ll be able to spot the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies that are interacting with our Milky Way galaxy. Saturn will be visible all night, and Venus and Jupiter will be low on the northeastern horizon just before dawn.

Even though the black moon isn’t a significant astronomical event, it gives us the chance to take in the night sky on a dark, Moon-free night.

Laura Nicole Driessen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Radio Astronomy, University of Sydney

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

Astronomers have glimpsed the inner structure of a dying star in a rare kind of cosmic explosion called an “extremely stripped supernova”.

In a paper published today in Nature, Steve Schulze of Northwestern University in the United States and colleagues describe the supernova 2021yfj and a thick shell of gas surrounding it.

Their findings support our existing theories of what happens inside massive stars at the end of their lives – and how they have shaped the building blocks of the universe we see today.

How stars make the elements

Stars are powered by nuclear fusion – a process in which lighter atoms are squished together into heavier ones, releasing energy.

Fusion happens in stages over the star’s life. In a series of cycles, first hydrogen (the lightest element) is fused into helium, followed by the formation of heavier elements such as carbon. The most massive stars continue on to neon, oxygen, silicon and finally iron.

Each burning cycle is faster than the previous one. The hydrogen cycle can last for millions of years, while the silicon cycle is over in a matter of days.

As the core of a massive star keeps burning, the gas outside the core acquires a layered structure, where successive layers record the composition of the progression of burning cycles.

While all this is playing out in the star’s core, the star is also shedding gas from its surface, carried out into space by the stellar wind. Each fusion cycle creates an expanding shell of gas containing a different mix of elements.

Core collapse

What happens to a massive star when its core is full of iron? The great pressure and temperature will make the iron fuse, but unlike the fusion of lighter elements, this process absorbs energy instead of releasing it.

The release of energy from fusion is what has been holding the star up against the force of gravity – so now the iron core will collapse. Depending on how big it is to start with, the collapsed core will become a neutron star or a black hole.

The process of collapse creates a “bounce”, which sends energy and matter flying outwards. This is called a core-collapse supernova explosion.

The explosion lights up the layers of gas shed from the star earlier, allowing us to see what they are made of. In all known supernovae until now, this material was either the hydrogen, the helium or the carbon layer, produced in the first two nuclear burning cycles.

The inner layers (the neon, oxygen and silicon layers) are all produced in a mere few hundred years before the star explodes, which means they don’t have time to travel out far from the star.

An explosive mystery

But that’s what makes the new supernova SN2021yfj so interesting. Schulze and colleagues found the material outside the star came from the silicon layer, the last layer just above the iron core, which forms on a timescale of a few months.

The stellar wind must have expelled all the layers right down to the silicon one before the explosion occurred. Astronomers don’t understand how a stellar wind could be powerful enough to do this.

The most plausible scenario is a second star was involved. If another star were orbiting the one that exploded, its gravity might have rapidly pulled out the deep silicon layer.

Exploding stars made the universe what it is today

Whatever the explanation, this view deep inside the star has confirmed our theories of the cycles of nuclear fusion inside massive stars.

Why is this important? Because stars are where all the elements come from.

Carbon and nitrogen are manufactured primarily by lower mass stars, similar to our own Sun. Some heavy elements such as gold are manufactured in the exotic environments of colliding and merging neutron stars.

However, oxygen and other elements such as neon, magnesium and sulfur mainly come from core-collapse supernovae.

We are what we are because of the inner workings of stars. The constant production of elements in stars causes the universe to change continuously. Stars and planets formed later are very different from those formed in earlier times.

When the universe was younger it had much less in the way of “interesting” elements. Everything worked somewhat differently: stars burned hotter and faster and planets may have formed less, differently, or not at all.

How much supernovae explode and just what they eject into interstellar space is a critical question in figuring out why our Universe and our world are the way they are.

Orsola De Marco, Professor of Astrophysics, Macquarie University

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

In the archaeology galleries of the Yorkshire Museum, an incredible Viking silver neck-ring takes centre stage. The ring is made of four ropes of twisted rods hammer-welded together at each end, its terminals tapering into scrolled S-shaped hooks for fastening behind the neck. Weighing over half a kilo, it makes a less-than-subtle statement about the wealth and status of its Viking owner some 1,100 years ago.

The neck-ring was part of a large silver and gold hoard found in 2012 by metal detectorists Stuart Campbell and Steve Caswell near Bedale in North Yorkshire. As the first precious object out of the ground, it was initially mistaken by Campbell for a discarded power cable.

Six years later, I got the chance to analyse the Bedale hoard, as it is now known, for its isotopes and trace elements. Alongside the neck-ring and a gold Anglo-Saxon sword pommel (probably acquired in England by these Viking raiders), the hoard contained a spectrum of cast-silver artefacts spanning the Viking age: Irish-Scandinavian artefacts from Dublin, rings from southern Scandinavia, and many cigar-shaped bars or ingots that could have been cast anywhere.

As an archaeologist investigating the historical secrets held by jewellery such as this, picking up these heavy objects and turning them over in my hands was a visceral experience. I felt connected with the desires, ambition and sheer force of these invaders from the north who had wreaked havoc on communities in northern England around AD900.

Indeed, the entire Viking age (circa 750-1050) is often described as an “age of silver”. This form of wealth was so desired that its acquisition was a primary driver of the expansion out of Scandinavia that the Vikings are most famed for. To acquire it, they were prepared to risk their own lives – and take those of many others.

Tens of thousands of silver objects and coins are known from hoards and settlements across the Scandinavian homelands of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, as well as far overseas – from England to Russia and beyond. The study of this silver’s origins opens a window on the vast web of connections these warrior-traders established – a study invigorated in recent years by scientific techniques drawn from geochemistry.

Now, our analysis of the Bedale hoard and other Viking valuables promises to change the story of when their fellow-Scandinavians began travelling thousands of miles to the east to secure the silver that so captivated them.

The origins of these ‘violent chancers’

The word “Viking” comes from the Old Norse víkingr, meaning someone who participated in a sea raid or military expedition. The seeds of the outburst of piracy and overseas expansion that characterised the Viking age were sown in the 5th and 6th centuries, following the demise of the Roman empire.

While Scandinavia was never actually part of the Roman empire, its fall severed important trade links and led to factional fighting. In addition, volcanic eruptions in the mid-6th century induced prolonged climatic cooling, leading to crop failure and famine. Together, these events fractured Scandinavian society: archaeologists can point to abandoned settlements and cultivation fields as evidence for community displacement and decline.

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There was also a striking absence of silver in the region at this time, despite Scandinavia possessing native silver ores. While Roman silver plate and coin had previously reached Scandinavia and been melted down to make huge, stunning “relief” brooches worn by women, this flow of silver had declined sharply by the 6th century. In the following century, most jewellery was made of copper alloy – silver wasn’t being mined, and in this overwhelmingly agrarian society, precious metal was an unnecessary luxury.

In Scandinavia, where farming was challenging due to short summers and long harsh winters, wealth and power lay in good farming land and cattle – with payments typically made in butter, cloth, horses, sheep, hides and iron. As archaeologist Dagfinn Skre explains:

In an economy in which the supply of necessities was threatened, a man who had his moveable wealth in cows … would survive, but one who had it invested in metal would die. His metal would be close to worthless – for who would exchange their cows, butter or grain for metal in times of famine?

Yet out of this period of domestic struggle, a new and ambitious elite emerged in Scandinavia, particularly around the fjords of Norway and in the central Mälaren valley in Sweden – fertile regions which afforded access to both inland resources and coastal waterways.

Dubbed “violent chancers” by historian Guy Halsall, they seized abandoned land and valuable resources such as tar, furs and iron for weapons. They developed multiple, competing chiefdoms which they defended through a martial culture propped up by lavish consumption, trade and violence.

Archaeologists can point to tangible survivals of this culture: luxury imports such as glass claw beakers, elaborately furnished burials under huge mounds, monumental halls and full-on military kits. These warriors had shields decorated with bird-of-prey figures, crested helmets covered with silver foils, and swords with pommels covered in gold and garnets. They were not to be messed with.

Their success, coupled with these coastal people’s refined tradition of boat-building, enabled them to build and kit out fleets of ships. Surviving examples indicate these were long and narrow, with hulls made of overlapping (clinker) planking and shallow keels suitable for use in creeks, estuaries and beach landings. At first propelled by oar, the later adoption of sails enabled these ships to undertake long sea crossings.

In the late-8th century, Scandinavians began launching violent seaborne attacks on centres of wealth in neighbouring countries – first the coastal towns, monasteries and churches of modern-day Britain, Ireland and France, then later expanding their raids into Germany and Spain, and as far south as the north coast of Morocco. These centres of population provided human capital for the Viking slave trade, while enriching the invaders with portable wealth in the form of liturgical plates and reliquaries (from monasteries), silver coin and other high-status artefacts.

A raid on the north-east England island monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 – the first documented attack in the west – was probably launched from Norway. Its precise targeting suggests the raiders were well-informed about their destination, and no doubt attracted by stories of the riches held there. Writing afterwards, York cleric Alcuin described how the church had been “spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishing, exposed to the plundering of pagans”.

Alcuin blamed the attacks on his community’s “fornications, adulteries and incest” which have “poured over the land … even against the handmaids dedicated to God” – that is, nuns. The Vikings had made off not just with church treasure, but had also led away youths “into captivity”.

The capture of slaves was a common tactic. Some, like the boys from Lindisfarne, might have ended their days in Scandinavia or have been sold on at slave markets. But often, they were ransomed back to their communities for cash. After Vikings captured the abbot of St Denis in 858, for example, church treasuries “were drained dry” in order to meet their ransom demands of nearly 700lb of gold and 3,250lb of silver. “But even all this was far from being enough,” lamented the period’s chronicler Prudentius, bishop of Troyes.

The Viking pattern of raiding, looting and slaving is a dominant theme of 9th-century annals from Ireland, England and the Carolingian continent (spanning much of modern-day western Europe). In 842, Vikings made a surprise early-morning attack on the trading port of Quentovic in modern-day France. “They plundered it and laid waste,” recorded Prudentius, leaving “nothing in it except those buildings which they had been paid to spare”.

Accounts such as these record massive sums of silver extracted by the Vikings or offered as protection money. The extent of Viking accumulation of silver is staggering: the annals suggest that over the 9th century, the total loot in Viking hands amounted to 30,000lb of silver – or 7 million Carolingian pennies.

This stock is likely to have provided a stimulus to the economic development of nascent towns such as York and Lincoln in Scandinavian-settled areas of England, which are thought to have been more economically buoyant than their counterparts in “English” England.

Why did the Vikings come to value silver so highly? While the ownership of land and livestock was determined by strict laws of inheritance, silver could be obtained independently and with little resource investment, bypassing these normal routes of advancement. In this sense, silver embodied a new kind of dynamism coinciding with a different mode of behaviour.

These “nouveau rich” Vikings could not necessarily buy land with silver, but it gave them status – enabling people without inherited assets to acquire, and pass on, wealth. While the division of farmland and cattle upon marriage or death could be tricky, silver was ideally suited to such payments.

To these new generations of Scandinavians, silver became a standard of value that could guarantee investments, settle disputes and underwrite inheritance claims. It could be used to cement relationships – acting, as archaeologist Soren Sindbaek puts it, as a “virtual social glue”.

Silver analysis leads to a staggering result

But as well as value, silver stores information in its chemical composition that can reveal where it came from – something I have investigated as head of a research team over the last five years. We have analysed hundreds of silver Viking-age objects including from the Bedale hoard, with its rich mixture of rings and ingots cast by Scandinavians.

To make the hoard’s massive twisted silver neck-ring, for example, Viking metalcasters would have melted down numerous silver coins or small pieces of deliberately cut “hacksilver”. Once melted, the silver was cast into ingots, then gently hammered into long rods which were heated and twisted together to form the neck-ring.

However, this process masked the original sources of that silver. The only way to tell where it came from would require techniques from geochemistry – so I took the objects to the British Geological Survey’s laboratory in the suburbs of Nottingham, where isotope scientist Jane Evans drilled tiny samples from each silver object to measure them for lead isotopes.

Just like the isotopes (of oxygen, strontium and sulphur) that are laid down in bone and teeth – from which we can trace people’s childhood origins – isotopes of lead can be used to trace silver back to its source. Most silver ores contain trace amounts of lead, the four stable isotopes of which vary according to the ore’s geological age and composition. These lead isotopes give each ore a “fingerprint”, which carries over into silver coins and other artefacts made from it.

Given the location of the Bedale hoard in North Yorkshire, I was confident that much of the silver would have come from local Anglo-Saxon and also Carolingian sources in mainland western Europe. In England, the Vikings started to settle from around 865. How they did so – whether by seizing land, purchasing it, or settling previously uninhabited areas – isn’t entirely clear, but the loot seized during their raids must have helped the process.

Plotting the ratios of the lead isotopes in the Bedale hoard for the first time, many of the results were as expected: several silver objects matched the ratios of Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian coinage, and other objects had been refined to raise their silver content prior to casting, using local lead in the process of cupellation.

Geochemical analysis of Bedale hoard items

But while many of the artefacts in the Bedale hoard yielded predictable results, a group of nine ingots stood out. Rather than matching western silver sources or local lead, they had the same isotope ratios as the Islamic currency of dirhams.

Dirhams minted between AD750 and 900 by the Umayyads and Abbasids, in what is today Iran and Iraq, were a particularly close match. Two of these ingots were marked with a cross, although whether this carried Christian meaning or was simply a way of marking out ownership is unclear. Either way, these massive ingots must have been cast in Scandinavia from Islamic silver dirhams and brought over to England in Viking hands, before being buried in North Yorkshire.

This result is staggering. The names of villages around Bedale like Snape and Newton-le-Willows sound very far from Mesopotamia – yet the Bedale hoard contained a substantial component of silver minted in Baghdad, Tehran and Isfahan.

These results have made us question the timing of the Viking age’s eastern expansion. While Islamic dirhams are plentiful in Scandinavia, they predominantly date to the 10th century. However, our analysis suggests that dirhams were already arriving in Scandinavia in the 9th century in much larger quantities than previously thought – with many being melted down as a raw material for casting.

To understand how this happened, we need to meet the Scandinavians who looked east rather than west in search of silver and other riches.

Who were the Scandinavians who went east?

While the Viking raids on western Europe are best-known thanks to the many surviving written accounts, some of their fellow-Scandinavians – largely drawn from modern-day Sweden – headed east, establishing riverine, trade-based settlements in what is now Russia and Ukraine.

The route led across the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland into northern Russia, transporting furs and slaves from northern Europe to the markets of the Islamic Caliphate. Finds of dirhams in Scandinavia represent the profit from this trade and show that it, too, had silver at its heart.

Over time, these Scandinavians adapted to life on the eastern waterways, adopting some cultural practices from local people such as the nomadic Khazars. The 10th-century diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, gave a frank description of this new community of traders – known as Rus rather than Vikings – who he met on the River Volga in northern Russia:

They are the filthiest of God’s creatures. They do not clean themselves after urinating or defecating, nor do they wash themselves after having sex …They are like wandering asses.

In 921, Ibn Fadlan had been sent by the Abbasid caliph, al-Muqtadir, as part of an embassy to the king of the Volga Bulgars, located near the modern town of Kazan in Tartastan, Russia. His travelogue-style account, or risāla, of that journey has become famous for the many eyewitness accounts of people he met along the way – including the Rus from northern Europe, whom he met as they traded with merchants from the Islamic empire at the market of Bulgar on the River Volga, roughly midway between Scandinavia and Baghdad.

The Rus people’s long and difficult journey from Scandinavia would have taken several months, involving multiple rivers and portages – when their boats had to be dragged across land. They traversed boreal forest and the Eurasia steppe, which was populated by various nomadic tribes. In this landscape, the only option was to travel by river – or, in winter, to use the river as an ice highway, substituting boats for sledges. But for the Rus, travelling this perilous eastern route, the Austrvegr, was worth the risk.

According to Ibn Fadlan, the Rus acted as middlemen, acquiring furs and slaves from hunter societies in forested areas and organising their shipment down river via trading posts that later developed into permanent settlements. The goods were sent to major markets such as Itil (on the Caspian Sea) and Bulgar, where they would be purchased by merchants from the caliphate.

What the Rus wanted in return for slaves and furs was dirhams: the fine silver coins, weighing roughly 3g each, which made up the currency of the Islamic Caliphate. The early 10th-century writer, Ahmad ibn Rustah, explained how the Rus “earn their living by trading in sable, grey squirrel and other furs. They sell them for silver coins which they set in belts and wear around their waist.”

Ibn Fadlan’s highly detailed travelogue explains that once a trader amassed 10,000 dirhams, he melted them down to create a neck-ring for his wife. After 20,000 dirhams, he made two. This was no doubt an exaggeration – such a neck-ring would weigh 65lb of silver – but the notion that a smallish group of traders acquired tens of thousands of silver dirhams is supported by archaeology.

For these Rus “traders”, just as important as the fur trade was the trade in enslaved people, who seem mainly to have been captured from the Slavic lands and what is now northern Russia, rather than western Europe. Scholars sometimes describe the Austrvegr as a trading route, but human trafficking can hardly be described as “trade” in the mercantile way that we understand it today. It was based on coercion and violence – the terrorising nature of Viking activity in the west was replicated in the east.

The Rus “treat their slaves well and dress them suitably”, Ibn Rusta wrote, “because for them they are an article of trade”. Yet it’s also clear that female slaves were exploited for sex. These reports underscore the grim reality of the Rus “trade” – that their insatiable quest for silver entailed human suffering.

Astonishingly, some 400,000 dirhams survive in Scandinavia and the Baltic, making the dirham the most common archaeological find type for the Viking age. However, most of these coins date to the first half of the 10th century.

Yet according to our analysis of the Bedale hoard, rather than the Viking age “starting” in the west, the eastern and western expansions may have happened in parallel from the end of the 8th century – with the wealth of the east a prime motivator of the Viking movement out of Scandinavia.

Today, in some of the place-names near Bedale in North Yorkshire, we see evidence of Scandinavian settlement: Aiskew is Old Norse for “Oak Wood”, and Firby means “Frith’s village”. But now we also have evidence of a connection between the Bedale hoard and Rus traders bringing silver back to Scandinavia from their exploits in the east – up to a century earlier than had been thought.

Laser analysis brings new discoveries

In our analysis of the Bedale hoard, lead isotopes alone weren’t enough to draw definitive conclusions. We needed additional data to confirm the Islamic origin of the nine ingots.

Not only do lead isotopes differ between source ores – so do trace elements. Gold and bismuth levels are especially helpful in evaluating the origin of silver, because, unlike other elements, they do not change when silver is melted down.

After digesting the results of the lead isotopes, I returned to the suburbs of Nottingham. With Simon Chenery, we put the Bedale hoard objects under an excimer laser (a type of ultraviolet laser), ablating tiny amounts of silver in order to record the levels of trace elements. This time, thrillingly, the results came through in real time.

They showed, for the Islamic-looking ingots, the telltale pattern of low gold that is characteristic of Abbasid silver. Abbasid dirhams of this date typically have gold levels below 0.4%, reflecting the low-gold character of nearby silver mines in the Taurus mountains, whereas gold levels in coins from western Europe are higher – around 1% in the late 9th century.

We discovered, too, that other artefacts were probably made from a mix of both western and eastern silver sources. This was true of the massive silver neck-ring as well as a smaller neck-ring from the hoard. Indeed, these two items appear to have been made from the same silver stock, suggesting that they travelled from their source to Bedale together.

While both could have been made in Scandinavia, the contribution of western silver raises the possibility that they were produced locally in Yorkshire, by metal casters with access to both distant, Islamic dirhams and local, Anglo-Saxon silver.

Our analysis shows the Islamic contribution to the Bedale hoard is more significant than we would have expected for a Viking hoard from England. In all, the nine ingots weigh 715g, equivalent to around 240 dirhams. And taking into account the Islamic contribution to the “mixed” silver artefacts, Islamic silver comprises around a third of the total weight of silver from the hoard (weighing around 3,700g).

Clearly, the Vikings were not only extracting silver from areas they raided and conquered, they were also bringing it in via their long-distance trade networks in the east. This result reveals the unexpected connectedness of the Vikings’ eastern and western expansions. Far from being separate phenomena, the profits of one directly fed into the activities of the other. Gains made from the Austrvegr may have enabled a group of Scandinavians to launch raids to the west and acquire further wealth and land.

In the west, these raids lasted for around 70 years from the late 8th century, spanning two or three generations. But eventually, the Vikings decided to settle. In northern England, where Bedale is located, they proceeded “to plough and to support themselves”, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 876 AD. Finds of female Scandinavian dress items from England suggest that whole families, not just retired warriors, settled there.

Many questions remain about the nature of this settlement – including whether the raiders-turned-settlers lived separately from or with the native Anglo-Saxon population, and how the settlement process was brokered. But the former Vikings and their families appear to have integrated relatively quickly, adopting Christian forms of burial, developing craft industries in towns, and embracing coinage as a means of exchange. Among the settled Scandinavian population, the violence ceased.

Silver remained an important medium for displaying values and even identities. From around 900, new Anglo-Scandinavian rulers minted their own coinage – sometimes preserving traditional features familiar to Anglo-Saxons, but also adding new aspects that proclaimed a Scandinavian background. Coins minted by the new rulers of York, a focus of Scandinavian settlement in northern England, could have a Christian cross on one side and a Thor’s hammer – an overt pagan symbol – on the other.

These Anglo-Scandinavian coins were in use across Scandinavian-settled regions of England and are testimony to the continued importance of silver to the Viking economy – now channelled into a form that was more regulated and acceptable to the local Anglo-Saxon community. Geochemical analysis of the silver in these coins also reveals glimpses of this process of assimilation. Our investigation of a handful of examples, using the same techniques of lead isotope and trace element analysis, suggests they were made mainly with Anglo-Saxon silver – but again with a modest contribution from Islamic dirhams.

The end of the eastern adventure

The geochemical analysis of silver helps reveal the reasons for the extraordinary expansion of the Vikings and their fellow Scandinavians – including pointing to the wealth gained in eastern markets as a major (and hitherto neglected) “pull” factor. To a greater degree than has traditionally been acknowledged, eastern silver travelled across the Scandinavian world of the Viking age.

The huge number of Samanid dirhams found in Scandinavia point to the 930s-940s as the most fruitful decades for the Scandinavian travellers’ trade with the east. The Rus’s slave and fur trade continued until around 950 – and silver analysis again helps to explain why it came to a fairly sudden end. Analysis of the silver content of dirhams shows their fineness declined sharply from the 940s and 950s – a reflection, no doubt, of the drying up of silver mines in Central Asia.

It did not take long for Vikings to seek out silver sources closer to home. They turned to coins from the area of modern-day Germany, struck with silver from the newly-exploited Harz mountains, which they obtained mainly through trade. The decline in the silver content of dirhams thus led to a major reconfiguration of Scandinavian trade routes.

From this point on, long-distance trade with the east declined significantly. The Vikings instead turned again to the west, establishing trade links with England and Germany. In the late 10th century, increasingly powerful Scandinavian kings also launched new seaborne raids, exploiting the weakness of English kings such as Æthelred II “the Unready” (978–1016) and initiating what has become known as the “second Viking age” in England.

These raids, launched from around 980, were bigger, more centrally organised, and successful. The Vikings obtained significant quantities of “Danegeld”: protection payments made in coin. Ultimately, in 1016, the Danish king Cnut established himself on the English throne. The nature of the relationship between England and Scandinavia during this period is also being explored through silver, in a project on coinage from the recently-discovered Lenborough hoard.

If the pattern identified for the Bedale hoard plays out across other Viking hoards, it will prompt a major re-evaluation of the movements of the earliest Scandinavian warrior-traders. As part of the same project, we have been analysing Viking silver hoards of a similar 9th-century date from Sweden and Denmark, the Carolingian continent, southern Scotland and the west coast of England. Preliminary results suggest a regional pattern, but with Islamic silver appearing to be dominant in many cases.

What’s clear is that in the 9th century, the Vikings were already awash in Islamic silver. Meanwhile, more undiscovered treasures like that found in Bedale lie quietly underground, waiting to reveal their secrets.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• What 2,000 years of Chinese history reveals about today’s AI-driven technology panic – and the future of inequality

• Meet the forgotten enslaved and working-class labourers behind British exploration in Africa, Asia and Antarctica

• The Innu have lived in eastern Canada for thousands of years, yet their rights to this land are increasingly threatened by the question: who is Indigenous?

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Jane Kershaw, Gad Rausing Associate Professor of Viking Age Archaeology, University of Oxford

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

Astronomers are living in a golden age of bigger and better telescopes. But even our most advanced technology pales in comparison to the power of nature’s own “cosmic magnifying glasses” – strong gravitational lenses.

In less than 50 years we have gone from the first-ever discovery of a strong gravitational lens to now finding thousands. As new telescopes come online, we’re expecting to discover thousands more.

With these lenses, we can look deep into the universe, and catch glimpses into the most puzzling of contemporary cosmic mysteries: dark matter and dark energy.

So, what are gravitational lenses and how do they work?

A spectacular demonstration of gravity

Gravitational lenses are the most visually spectacular demonstration of Albert Einstein’s theories of gravity.

According to Einstein, mass bends and warps the very fabric of space, in much the same way that a heavy bowling bowl placed on a mattress will bend the mattress beneath it.

Everything with mass (you, me, a leaf, an atom) bends space-time in this way.

But it’s only when an object is really massive – such as entire galaxies and clusters of galaxies – that this effect becomes so apparent. As light travels from distant objects and passes these massive galaxies, the warped space-time around them bends and focuses this light, magnifying it for us to see.

We’re not always in the right place to see this effect. Just like how you need to align a magnifying glass in front of your eye, we only observe the gravitational lensing effect when there is a chance alignment of the background object, the foreground lens, and us.

On the rare occasions when this happens, through our telescopes we see multiple, distorted but magnified versions of an object that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to see because it’s too faint.

Revealing the invisible

Even Einstein couldn’t have predicted how important gravitational lenses would become to modern astronomy. In fact, he believed them impossible to observe at all.

This was because Einstein was thinking about gravitational lensing around individual stars, not galaxies. It wasn’t until decades later that astronomers came to realise just how massive galaxies are, and just how full of them our universe is.

Impressively, gravitational lenses can also reveal details about things we can’t see at all.

Theories predict about 85% of the matter that makes up the universe is invisible stuff called dark matter. The way a gravitational lens bends and warps light allows us to measure how much matter is in galaxies – not just the regular matter we can see, but dark matter as well.

Gravitational lenses can also help us map galaxy clusters across the universe, helping us to understand its shape. Is our universe perfectly flat like a sheet of paper? Or does it have curvature to it like a sphere, or flare outwards like a horse saddle?

That depends on how dense the universe is, and mapping galaxy clusters helps us measure the density of a hypothetical force known as dark energy.

Looking at the distant universe

Gravitational lenses typically make the background objects ten to 100 times brighter than they would be otherwise. This effect provides a high-definition view of the distant universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been taking advantage of this magnification boost to get a glimpse into what the universe was like in its infancy more than 13 billion years ago, shortly (300 million years) after the Big Bang.

Looking far into the past helps us piece together how our own celestial home, the Milky Way galaxy, formed and how it might change in the future.

We’re about to be spoilt for choice

The catch to all this is gravitational lenses are rare – akin to a needle in a cosmic-scale haystack. To find them, we need high quality images of large swaths of the night sky.

This year, two new skywatching projects are expected to revolutionise the field: the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.

Euclid, which launched in 2023 and released its first batch of data earlier this year, will image a monumental one-third of the entire sky, with a clarity that only comes from being in space.

Conversely, the Vera Rubin Observatory will be working from the ground, but will image the entire southern hemisphere sky. It will create the most detailed time-lapsed view of the cosmos ever seen.

Over their lifetimes Euclid and the Vera Rubin Observatory are predicted to unveil 100,000 new gravitational lenses, 100 times more than we currently know.

How do we find these 100,000 gravitational lenses among the billions of galaxies observed by these telescopes? It is not feasible for scientists to wade through that many images alone.

Instead, Euclid is relying on citizen scientists to help train AI models to know what to look for. By having people each look through a few images and classifying whether they are gravitational lenses or not, AI models can learn from these examples and can then search the entire dataset (if you want to get involved, check out their website).

From individual lenses providing unique new insights into distant galaxies, to studying the effect over large statistical samples to understand the very nature of the universe, gravitational lenses do it all. They are the Swiss Army knife in an astronomer’s toolkit, and we’re about to be spoilt for choice.

Tania Barone, Research Associate in Galaxy Evolution, Swinburne University of Technology

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

A year ago, French newspaper Le Monde and Radio France broke a scandal in big water – Perrier was filtering its product. The filtering began due to worries about water contamination linked to climate change and pollution of spring sources.

It was also revealed that executives at parent company Nestle and French government ministers tried to keep it all quiet. They allegedly covered up reports of contamination and changed the rules to allow micro-filtration.

Under EU law, for a brand to market their products as “natural mineral water” it has to remain unaltered. French mineral water companies are now awaiting a ruling on what level of filtration is considered illegal “treatment”. The result could mean that, after 160 years, Perrier will no longer be able to be call its product “natural mineral water”.

Strikingly, the same issue was debated extensively by scientists during the 18th-century European spring water boom. These men considered the effects of human intervention on the product and what was lost in the process.

A spa boom

In the 17th and 18th centuries, medical interest, in addition to factors like travel for leisure, resulted in the proliferation of new spa towns across Europe.

In England, Buxton and Tunbridge Wells developed in the 1620s and 1660s respectively, while Harrogate, Cheltenham and Leamington came in the 1710s, 1750s and 1790s. Historical survey’s place the number of spas and wells offering healing mineral waters at around 350 in the 18th-century heyday.

Spas like Bath, Buxton and the Bristol Hotwell were thermal, offering hot bathing. However, other spa sources in England were not heated. This meant that those who wished to bathe had to do so in the cold, which was both undesirable, and at that time, considered dangerous. This was due to fears that the English cold climate, when combined with bodily exposure to cold water, could disrupt bodily rhythms an cause illness.

As a result, many of the cold spas focused on offering health benefits through drinking their waters. When hailing the qualities of the newly discovered waters at Scarborough in 1660, Yorkshire doctor Robert Wittie declared they had “gained such credit” that people: “Come above an hundred miles to drink of it, preferring it to all other medicinal waters they had formerly frequented.”

He later described the health benefits he gained from drinking them:

I had lost two pound and a half of my weight… I found after it better agility of body, and alacrity of spirit then before.

In 1654, the doctor Edmund Deane had similarly described the effects of the waters of Knaresborough: “Those waters at the Spaw doe presently heal, and (as it were) miraculously cure diseases, which are without all hope of recovery.”

Testing the waters

As the number of spas grew, so did the options for consumers. As a result, the 18th century saw increasing attention and experimentation on mineral waters by scientists. Rather than questioning the health benefits, they instead compared waters to one another, experimenting on them to determine processes that produced and changed healing properties.

For example, British doctor George Turner, who translated and expanded upon a German work about the spa of Bad Pyrmont, in 1733. His work discussed experiments on the waters of the spa and the minerals that could be determined within. It noted that if left standing, the carbonated water lost its potency: “Whence it is, that so spiritous a liquid does so easily turn to a flat insipid water.”

He also suggested that boiling caused mineral waters to lose some invisible element important to its proper function. “Why so many globules of air arise out of mineral waters when it is warmed?” he asked, only to conclude that when “spirits fly out of any liquid” they go “incognito without any tumult”. As they “flew”, so too did whatever gave these waters healing properties, making chemical recreation in a lab impossible.

Historians of science have suggested that works like this foregrounded the concept of “gas”, which came more conclusively later in the century.

During experiments on the Scarborough waters, doctor Peter Shaw and natural scientist Stephen Hales each sought to determine the nature of the “subtle sulphurous spirit” in which they felt the “principal virtue of the Chalybeate (flavoured with iron) Waters resided”.

Similar experiments also involved extensive filtering, with physician John Nott in 1793 adding solutions to the waters of Italy’s Pisa and France’s Verdun before filtering them and performing further tests on “what remains in the filter”.

Scottish physician, Thomas Short, had concluded previously that filtering waters was both an important natural process. He described “the several strange alterations that water undergoes, by being strained through different strata of minerals”. But also that the body inherently filtered “raw” mineral waters through its skin when bathing, allowing only those smaller minerals in to provide the health effect, he claimed.

These scientists used their burgeoning chemical understanding to conclude that processes performed on waters fundamentally changed them, going from “spiritous” cures to “flat insipid water”. Even lacking the full knowledge or vocabulary to express why, they felt their processes and tools were incapable of recreating the waters of nature.

Legacies of these ideas can be seen in our changing attitudes to food and drink. Modern branding and consumer value is placed on a lack of processing. We are increasingly concerned with capturing and consuming the natural as it is, before human intervention has muddied it.

In so doing, we continue the ideas of those concerned with mineral waters all that time ago. By filtering their waters, no matter how little Perrier claim it affected them, we feel as though some spirit of the natural has perhaps been lost.

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Daniel Gettings, Sessional Tutor, Department of History, University of Warwick

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

John Rivers, John Bailey, David Middleton, Leroy Major and Buck Godfrey – all teammates from the 1955 Cannon Street YMCA Little League All-Star team – left Charleston, South Carolina, on a bus on Aug. 18, 2025.

After a stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for a couple days – where their story is included in an exhibit on Black baseball that opened in 2024 – they’ll head to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

There, they’ll be recognized before the Little League World Series championship game on August 24, 2025 – 70 years after the players, then 11 and 12 years old, watched the championship game from the bleachers, wondering why they weren’t on the field living out their own dreams instead of watching other boys live out theirs.

When the Cannon Street team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry and the Southern way of life.

White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street team, who represented the first Black Little League in South Carolina. The team won two tournaments by forfeit. They were supposed to then go to a regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where, if they won, they’d advance to the Little League World Series.

But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible for the regional tournament because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, as the rules stipulated.

A 4-team Black league is born

The Civil Rights Movement is often told in terms of court decisions, bus boycotts and racist demagogues. It’s rarely told from the point of view of children, who suffered in ways that left physical and emotional scars.

When I was a journalism professor at the College of Charleston, I learned how the presence of a single Black all-star team was enough to cause one of the biggest crises in Little League history. In 2022, I wrote the book “Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War.”

The team’s story begins in 1953. Robert Morrison, president of the Cannon Street YMCA, petitioned Little League Baseball to create a league for Black teams, and Little League Baseball granted the charter. Dozens of Black 11- and 12-year-old boys were selected for the four-team league before the 1954 season.

They played on a diamond of grass and gravel at Harmon Field in Charleston, a city with a long history of racial strife. In 1861, the Civil War began in Charleston harbor, where hundreds of thousands of slaves had been brought to the U.S. from the 1600s to the 1800s. The field also wasn’t far from Emanuel AME church, where nine Black parishioners were murdered during a prayer meeting in 2015.

Little League Baseball barred first-year leagues from the postseason tournaments. At some point during the 1955 season, the best players were selected for the league’s All-Star team. Cannon Street YMCA officials then registered the team for the Charleston city tournament, which included all-star teams from the city’s all-white leagues.

Little League Baseball officially prohibited racial discrimination. But in South Carolina, racial discrimination was still legal.

Dixie fights back

The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier that segregation in schools was unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, paving the way for racial integration.

Few states resisted integration as fiercely as South Carolina, and no politician fought harder against racial equality than the state’s junior U.S. senator, Strom Thurmond.

So when the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars registered for Charleston’s citywide tournament in July 1955, all the white teams withdrew. The Cannon Street team won by forfeit and advanced to the state tournament.

Danny Jones, the state’s director of Little League Baseball, petitioned the organization to create a segregated state tournament. Little League Baseball’s president, Peter McGovern, denied Jones’ request. He said that any team that refused to play the Cannon Street team would be banned from the organization.

Thurmond let it be known to Jones that an integrated tournament could not be permitted. In the end, Jones urged all the white teams to withdraw from the state tournament. He then resigned from Little League Baseball, created the Little Boys League and wrote the league’s charter, which prohibited Black players.

The Little Boys League – which was rebranded as Dixie Youth Baseball – soon replaced Little League in other Southern states; within six years, there were 390 such leagues spanning most of the former Confederacy. It would be decades before Little League Baseball returned to South Carolina.

Having won the South Carolina tournament by forfeit, the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars prepared for the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where the state’s governor, Marvin Griffin, objected to integration. If youth baseball could be integrated, so, too, could schools, swimming pools and municipal parks, he said.

Let them play!

Little League rules said that teams could advance only by playing and winning, so the Cannon Street’s state championship was ruled invalid because it had come by forfeit.

McGovern decided against making an exception for the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars.

Most white-owned newspapers, whether in the South or North, had long stayed silent on the topic of racial discrimination. But the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars broke through. Editors and reporters may have wanted to avoid the topic of racism, but boys being denied the opportunity to play in a baseball tournament was too objectionable to ignore.

On July 31, 1955, New York Daily News columnist Dick Young asked Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, who had broken Major League Baseball’s color barrier eight years earlier, about the white teams that had quit the tournament rather than play against a Black team.

“How stupid can they be?” Robinson said. “I had to laugh when I read the story.”

Perhaps pressured by criticism, McGovern, Little League’s president, invited the team to be Little League’s guests for the championship game. So the team boarded a bus for Williamsport. They arrived the night before the championship game, which pitted Morrisville, Pennsylvania, against Delaware Township, New Jersey, an integrated team.

The Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and their coaches were introduced before the game, and the players recall hearing a loud voice from the bleachers.

“Let them play!” it boomed.

Others in the crowd joined in, the players said.

“Let them play! Let them play!”

John Rivers, who played second base for the team, told me he can still “hear it now.”

After their brief moment on the field, the Cannon Street All-Stars returned to their seats and watched other boys live out their dreams. A photograph of the team in the stands reveals the disappointment on their faces.

On the following day – Aug. 28, 1955 – the team boarded its bus to return to Charleston. It was the same date that Emmett Till, not much older than the players on the team, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman.

The boys and girls who play in the 2025 tournament will forever remember the experience. The surviving members of the Cannon Street All-Stars, who are all in their early 80s, never forgot what they were denied.

Rivers, who went on to become a successful architect, says this is the moral of their story.

“It’s a tragedy to take dreams away from a youngster,” Rivers told The Washington Post in 2022. “I knew it then. I know it now, and I’ve seen to it that no one takes dreams away from me again.”

Now there are some on the political right who want to bury America’s ugly racial history.

America has never fully reckoned with slavery or the decades of segregation, Rivers recently told me. “It just decided to move on from that ugly period in its history without any kind of therapy,” he said. “And now they are trying to sweep it all under the rug again.”

Portions of this article first appeared in an article published on Aug. 19, 2016.

Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

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

Australia is home to an extraordinary variety of wildlife, ranging from striking palm cockatoos to elusive mountain pygmy-possums and remarkable rat-kangaroos.

Most of us never get to see these creatures in real life – and that’s a real shame. Spending time in nature looking for wildlife is more than just a hobby – it’s a way to reconnect with the natural world and remember why it matters.

But how do you actually see these creatures for yourself? It’s often easier than you think.

As wildlife researchers, we’ve spent a long time in the field looking for wildlife. Here are ten standout locations where you have a good chance of seeing some genuinely remarkable Australian creatures – and tips on doing so without causing them stress or harming the environment.

1. Kutini-Payamu/Iron Range National Park, Queensland

Located in far north Queensland, Iron Range is renowned for lush rainforests and rich wildlife. Here, you can spot majestic palm cockatoos, secretive green pythons, the striking green, red and blue hues of eclectus parrots and the adorable common spotted cuscus, a species of possum. These species also occur in Papua New Guinea, but the Cape York region is the only place to spot them in Australia.

Spotting tips: Walk the trails with binoculars during peak times for bird activity, early morning or late afternoon. At night, use a head torch to spot pythons, frogs, death adders, geckoes, rufous owls, cuscus and other nocturnal fauna.

2. Atherton Tablelands, Queensland

Inland from Cairns lies the Atherton Tablelands, an elevated region with a cooler climate and abundant and diverse wildlife. Here, you can spot vibrant Ulysses butterflies, shy platypuses and rare marsupials. Australia’s largest snake, the scrub python, can block entire roads as it warms itself up before the night’s hunt. Rare waterfall frogs can be spotted in fast-flowing falls.

Lumholtz’s tree kangaroos can be spotted hopping along limbs at Curtain Fig National Park and Mount Hypipamee National Park, alongside green ringtail possums and striped possums with elongated fingers to ferret out grubs.

Meanwhile, musky rat-kangaroos can be seen “gardening” on the forest floor at Lake Eacham and Lake Barrine. These are the smallest kangaroos and the only non-hopping species. Your best chance of sighting an elusive northern quoll or northern bettong is at Davies Creek National Park.

Spotting tips: Take guided night walks to glimpse nocturnal wildlife. Use a head torch with a red filter. Move quietly and regularly stop to listen for movement and animal calls. Binoculars are a must for spotting creatures high in the canopy.

3. Western Treatment Plant, Victoria

Surprisingly, Melbourne’s Western Treatment Plant is a mecca for birdwatchers. The huge wastewater facility is recognised as a wetland of international importance. Migratory birds such as sharp-tailed sandpipers and red-necked stints can be seen, while well-hidden bitterns, rare orange-bellied parrots and Australia’s dancing crane, the brolga, can be glimpsed feeding in dense heath during cooler months. Almost 300 species have been recorded here.

Spotting tips: Visit during migration seasons (spring and autumn) for the best birdwatching opportunities. Use binoculars, telescopes, or telephoto lenses for close-up views without disturbance. Visitors need a permit.

4. Lunawanna-allonah/Bruny Island and Wukaluwikiwayna/Maria Island, Tasmania

South of Hobart lies Bruny Island, a sanctuary for endangered species such as eastern and spotted-tailed quolls. Most of Tasmania’s endemic bird species are found here, such as green rosellas and forty-spotted pardalotes. Rare swift parrots can also be seen.

North of Hobart is Maria Island, an island national park where no cars are allowed – and where Tasmanian devils, bandicoots and wombats can readily be seen.

Spotting tips: Join guided tours to see nocturnal wildlife or birds in Bruny Island’s tall forests. Eastern quolls can often be seen at night on the main road when heading north from the island’s isthmus. Tasmanian devils and bandicoots can be seen around campsites at Maria Island at night.

5. Flinders, Portsea and Blairgowrie piers, Victoria

Snorkelling the cool waters beneath Flinders, Portsea and Blairgowrie piers is a revelation. Here live spectacular weedy sea dragons, sand octopuses, big-belly seahorses, ornate cowfish, smooth and eagle rays, Port Jackson and banjo sharks and vividly coloured nudibranchs.

Spotting tips: Snorkel or dive during calm weather for best visibility. Keep your distance from marine life for their safety (and yours).

6. Sydney Harbour and cliff tops, New South Wales

Sydney’s iconic harbour and surrounding cliffs are well suited for marine life enthusiasts. Every winter, humpback and southern right whales migrate past the headlands, while pods of bottlenose dolphins can be seen year-round. White-bellied sea eagles, Australasian gannets and short-tailed shearwaters add to the spectacle in the skies.

Spotting tips: Join whale-watching cruises between May and November for the best chance. Clifftop spotting is best done with binoculars from Royal National Park, North Head, Clovelly and The Gap.

7. Binybara/Lee Point, Northern Territory

Just north of Darwin is Lee Point, one of the best places to glimpse the elusive black-footed tree-rat. Weighing almost a kilo, this threatened native rodent is an expert climber and lives in tree hollows.

Around 200 bird species have also been recorded here. Flocks of great knots, eastern curlews and grey-tailed tattlers feed on the mudflats, while the woodlands are home to the dazzling colour of Gouldian finches and the charismatic blue-winged kookaburra.

Spotting tips: Visit at night to see the tree-rat moving between trees, or come at low tide to watch thousands of shorebirds feeding. Binoculars will be invaluable.

8. Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, Western Australia

Offshore from Perth, Rottnest Island is rightly famous for its smiling quokkas. But other unique species such as King’s skink and venomous dugites can be seen here too, while osprey nests occupied for decades can be seen on rock stacks. The reefs around the island have WA’s southernmost coral.

Spotting tips: Cycling is the best way to explore different habitats on the largely car-free island. Keep your distance from quokkas and other wildlife to ensure they stay wild.

9. Kunama Namadgi/Kosciuszko National Park, New South Wales

Australia’s highest peaks are home to the nation’s most remarkable alpine wildlife. Birdwatchers can spot gang-gang cockatoos feeding in eucalypts, while lucky hikers might glimpse an alpine dingo crossing a snow-dusted plain, or see a strikingly coloured Corroborree frog in a bog or fen.

This is the only place in the world where you can encounter a critically endangered mountain pygmy-possum. These tiny marsupials hibernate under winter snow and emerge to feed on bogong moths in spring.

Kosciuszko is also home to the native smoky mouse and – remarkably – to Leadbeater’s possum, long thought to be confined to Victoria’s Central Highlands.

Spotting tips: For the best chance of spotting a mountain pygmy-possum, visit between late spring and early summer when the snow has melted. Stick to alpine boulder fields such as those around Charlotte Pass and Mount Kosciuszko. You may need to camp overnight to see nocturnal possums and the smoky mouse. Binoculars and patience are essential to glimpse these shy species.

10. Karta Pintingga/Kangaroo Island, South Australia

Southwest of Adelaide lies the large Kangaroo Island, home to echidnas, tammar wallabies, a rare subspecies of the glossy black-cockatoo and Kangaroo Island dunnarts. Koalas are common. While the island’s isolation has protected these species, the 2020 megafires caused much damage. Wildlife is now bouncing back.

Spotting tips: Explore national parks and conservation areas with a local guide. Observe from a distance.

Take care of wildlife

Wildlife spotting has to be done with care. Think of yourself as a guest in someone else’s home.

Keep a respectful distance, don’t touch wildlife, move quietly and use binoculars or a zoom lens for a closer look rather than creeping closer.

If you’re out after dark, make sure your head torch has a red light option. This light is vastly less damaging to animal eyes optimised for the dark.

When snorkelling or diving, avoid hitting corals and sponges with your fins.

It can be tempting to use playback of calls to attract birds such as owls. But this is very disruptive and can do real damage.

Avoid moving logs, bark, stones and other habitat in your effort to see animals. This is disruptive and risks bites from venomous creatures.

Clean and disinfect your boots before moving between areas to avoid spreading soil-borne pathogens such as cinnamon fungus and chytrid fungus.

Whatever you do, don’t feed wildlife. It might seem harmless, but it can change their natural behaviour, make them ill and even make them dependent on people.

Posting sightings on citizen science apps such as iNaturalist and FrogID can help scientists learn more about these species and aid their conservation.

Enjoy the journey

As wildlife researchers, we often seek out species in their natural habitat. These moments never lose their impact.

It’s a remarkable thing to see a creature in its natural habitat. A successful sighting gives a sense of awe and joy. At a time when many people are cut off from nature, deliberately seeking out these species is a powerful and rewarding act.

Patrick Finnerty, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Conservation and Wildlife Management, University of Sydney; Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, and Rhys Cairncross, Ecologist and PhD Researcher, University of Sydney

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

You may have heard high-impact activity – exercise such as running, jumping, football and basketball – is good at building bone density and strength. But what about when you’re standing still, lifting weights at the gym?

The good news is weight training is great for bone health. But some exercises are more effective than others. Here’s what the science says.

What is bone density?

Bone density, also known as bone mineral density, is essentially a measure of how many minerals (such as calcium and phosphorus) are packed into your bones.

It gives you an indication of how solid your bones are, which is important because denser bones are generally less likely to break.

However, bone density is not quite the same as bone strength.

Bones also rely on a range of other compounds (such as collagen) to provide support and structure. So, even dense bones can become brittle if they are lacking these key structural components.

However, bone mineral density (measured with a bone scan) is still considered one of the best indicators of bone health because it is strongly linked to fracture risk.

While there is likely a genetic component to bone health, your daily choices can have a big impact.

What affects your bone health?

Research shows a few factors can influence how strong and dense your bones are:

Getting older: As we age, our bone mineral density tends to decrease. This decline is generally greater in women after menopause, but it occurs in everyone.

Nutrition: Eating calcium-rich foods – dairy in particular, but also many vegetables, nuts, legumes, eggs and meat – has been shown to have a small impact on bone density (although the extent to which this reduces fracture risk is unclear).

Exposure to sun: Sunlight helps your body make vitamin D, which helps you absorb calcium, and has been linked to better bone density.

Exercise: It is well established that people who do high-impact and high-load exercise (such as sprinting and weight training) tend to have denser and stronger bones than those who don’t.

Smoking: Older people who smoke tend to have lower bone density than those who don’t smoke.

Why does movement improve bone density?

In the same way that your muscles get stronger when you expose them to stress, your bones get stronger when they’re asked to handle more load. This is why exercise is so important for bone health – because it tells your bones to adapt and become stronger.

Many of us know that people at risk for bone loss – post-menopausal women and older adults – should be focused on exercising for bone health.

However, everyone can benefit from targeted exercise, and it’s arguably just as important to prevent declines in bone health.

In fact, whether you are male or female, the younger you start, the more likely you are to have denser bones into your older life. This is crucial for long-term bone health.

Do weights improve bone density?

Yes. One of the most effective exercises for bone health is lifting weights.

When you lift weights, your muscles pull on your bones, sending signals that encourage new bone formation. There is a large body of evidence showing weight training can improve bone density in adults, including in post-menopausal women.

But not all exercises are created equal. For example, some evidence suggests large compound exercises that place more load on the skeleton – such as squats and deadlifts – are particularly effective at increasing density in the spine and hips, two areas prone to fractures.

What type of weight training is best?

Lifting heavier weights is thought to produce better results than lifting lighter ones. This means doing sets of three to eight repetitions using heavy weights is likely to have a greater impact on your bones than doing many repetitions with lighter ones.

Similarly, it takes a long time for your bones to adapt and become denser – usually six months or more. This means for healthy bones, it’s better to integrate weight training into your weekly routine rather than do it in bursts for a few weeks at a time.

Exercises that use body weight, such as yoga and pilates, have many health benefits. However they are unlikely to have a significant impact on bone density, as they tend to put only light stress on your bones.

If you are new to weight training, you might need to start a bit lighter and get used to the movements before adding weight. And if you need help, finding an exercise professional in your local area might be a great first step.

Exercising for bone health is not complex. Just a couple of (heavy) weight training sessions per week can make a big difference.

If you’re concerned you have low bone density, speak to your doctor. They can assess whether you need to go for a scan.

Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia

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

In Australia, we can often tell what state someone is from based on the words they use: whether they go to the beach in “togs”, “bathers” or “swimmers” or if they prefer to eat a “potato cake”, “potato scallop” or “potato fritter”.

But compared to places such as the United States and United Kingdom, it can be harder to hear regional accent differences.

The relative uniformity of the Australian accent can be traced to our early European history, our youth as a nation and the slow pace of language change.

But Australian regional accents are there if you listen closely enough – and they are getting stronger.

Birth of the ‘uniform’ Aussie accent

In the UK, George Bernard Shaw once wrote:

It’s impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman hate or despise him.

Some 1500 years of history will do that.

In the US, “American English” dates to 16th/early 17th centuries, so settlement, history and depth of time have led to American regional variation.

For example, in the US South, a word like “time” might be said like “tom” or “tam”, a word like “bait” might sound like “bite” and a word like “sit” might be heard as “see it”.

In Australia, English only permanently arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, and observers began to comment on the uniformity of English from its early days. A visiting ship’s captain, James Dixon, wrote in 1822:

The children born in those colonies, now grown up, speak a better language, purer, more harmonious than is generally the case in most parts of England.

This didn’t mean Australian English was good. It just wasn’t “tainted” with regional accents.

The formation of new accents and languages often comes down to kids accommodating to one another (trying to sound like one another). But in the early days, these colonial kids had no Australian accent to accommodate to.

A linguistic melting pot

Early English-speaking Australians used a melting pot of features from London, Ireland, Scotland, the West Country and East Anglia (among other places).

We see this in Sydney court records such as this one, featuring an Irish woman, Margaret O’Brien:

On Monday night quoth, Mrs O’Brien, my blessed husband went to Saint Pathrick’ a’cos ‘tis a taytotaler he is […] I axked her in purlistest terms the raison of her wiolence… Hevings forgive you, Mary Han, for telling sich a whopper; yer an hinnercent girl Mary Han.

O’Brien uses some Irish features like “raison” for “reason” and “sich” for “such”. But she also uses “Cockney” features like “wiolence” for “violence” and “hinnercent” for “innocent”.

Linguists describe this as a “feature pool”. Over time, some features rise to the top of the pool whereas others sink into obscurity.

The survivors became “Australian English”.

Survival in the tumultuous feature pool is often a mix of “majority rules” and “prestige”.

Cockneys were neither a majority nor prestigious in Australia, so it is little wonder pronunciations like “wiolence” and “hinnercent” faded away.

Australia had many Irish settlers but their English wasn’t prestigious either. That said, there is some evidence of Irish influence – as in the way some Aussies say words like “haitch” and “filum” (for “film”).

Majority didn’t always rule when it came to deciding which features survived.

Once formed, the Australian accent stayed uniform for longer than you might expect.

This is because early European Australia had a highly mobile population: they often stuck close to the coast and travelled from port to port. When they travelled inland, they often did it together and in mixed company.

Australian English also stayed uniform longer because more than a few Aussies continued to look to Britain for their accent cues – some until the 1980s.

Early differences in Australian English were largely associated with social groups or whether one favoured British-like pronunciations or Australian-like pronunciations.

Before regional variation can flourish, English speakers must settle into stable and self-confident use of the local variety. To these ends, Australians have finally arrived.

Australian regional accents

The seeds for regional variation in Australia were planted early on. Yet, as in any garden, it can take a while for them to bloom: a language needs time, patience and the right social conditions.

South Australia was settled later than other colonies and by free settlers, who used newer pronunciations from the British homeland.

South Australians are apt to pronounce words like “castle”, “dance” and “chance” with a longer “ah” sound (as most English speakers pronounce “palm”).

In contrast, in Tasmania, these words are more apt to be pronounced with a shorter, flatter “a” sound (as most English speakers pronounce “trap”) – the older pronunciation.

In other parts of Australia, it is more complicated.

People in Brisbane and Sydney tend to follow the Tasmanian pattern. In Melbourne, a majority seem to follow the shorter, flatter “trap” pronunciation. However, Melburnians may also use, or shift into the “palm” pronunciation in more formal situations.

Beyond these early seeds, Australians are starting to cultivate homegrown innovations. Linguists working with sophisticated technologies have started to note subtle regional differences.

For instance, you may notice Victorians have begun to say the words “salary” and “celery” the same way. This vowel “merger” means many an “Ali” has received a coffee cup with “Eli” written on it in “Malbourne”.

Regional accents start as a wispy whisper. Put your ear to the wind and you just may hear them. But for a regional accent to truly flourish, you need a firm national identity, regional rivalries and a heavy dollop of time.

Keep your ears peeled.

Howard Manns, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University and Felicity Cox, Professor, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University

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

You have probably heard the phrase “follow your gut” – often used to mean trusting your instinct and intuition. But in the context of the gut-brain axis, the phrase takes on a more literal meaning. Scientific research increasingly shows that the brain and gut are in constant, two-way communication. Once overlooked, this connection is now at the forefront of growing interest in neuroscience, nutrition and mental health.

The gut–brain axis is a highly complex system of interconnected pathways that relay information through diverse signals. Previous research has suggested that gut inflammation may contribute to the development of dementia. This may occur through to the triggering of systemic inflammation and the disruption of the pathways between the gut and the brain.

While interest in the gut-brain axis has grown rapidly, there is still limited understanding of whether intestinal inflammation might accelerate cognitive decline in people who already have dementia.

IBD and dementia connection

Our study explored this under-researched question, aiming to expand understanding in this area and improve the care of those affected. We focused on people who had already been diagnosed with both dementia and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Dementia refers to a group of neurological disorders with different underlying causes, all characterised by progressive cognitive decline and increasing loss of independent function.

It is a growing global health concern, with the number of diagnoses rising steadily around the world. Older age remains the most significant risk factor for developing the condition.

In 2024, the FDA approved donanemab, a second novel drug aimed at slowing the progression of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease – the most common form of dementia. However, there is still no cure, and current treatments are primarily focused on managing symptoms.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a complex, chronic inflammatory condition affecting the gastrointestinal tract. It includes Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and IBD-unclassified (also called indeterminate IBD), which refers to cases where symptoms and clinical findings do not clearly fit the criteria for either Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.

IBD is typically characterised by symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhoea and changes in bowel habits. However, because it can have systemic (extra-intestinal) effects, the condition can also affect other parts of the body, including the skin, eyes, joints and liver but can also cause general fatigue.

IBD should not be confused with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is a common functional condition of the gastrointestinal tract. IBS can cause similar symptoms – such as abdominal pain and changes in bowel habits – however, unlike IBD, there are no changes in gut tissue.

While there is currently no cure for IBD, except in ulcerative colitis, where, in some select cases, surgery may be curative, IBD can often be managed with (anti-inflammatory) medications and lifestyle changes.

IBD is a global health problem. Worldwide, between 1990 and 2021, new cases increased across all age groups, with the biggest jump seen in people aged 50 to 54. The smallest increase occurred in children under five. Importantly, IBD can be diagnosed from early childhood to later life, but in older adults, among others, symptoms can be mistaken for other conditions – potentially delaying diagnosis and treatment.

For our study, we used data from the Swedish Registry for Cognitive/Dementia Disorders (SveDem) – a comprehensive national quality registry that holds detailed medical information on people with various forms of dementia across Sweden. From this database, we identified people who were diagnosed with IBD after their dementia diagnosis. We then compared 111 people who had both dementia and newly diagnosed IBD with a control group of 1,110 people who had dementia but no IBD diagnosis. The two groups were closely matched for age, gender, type of dementia, other health conditions and medication use.

Measuring cognitive decline

To measure changes in cognitive function, we used the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score. The MMSE is a standardised test made up of 11 tasks, with a maximum score of 30 points. It is widely used by healthcare professionals to assess memory, attention, language and other aspects of cognitive performance, particularly when dementia is suspected. People without dementia typically score between 25 and 30, while those with dementia often score below 24.

In our study, we compared MMSE scores between the two groups. We also looked at changes in MMSE scores before and after the IBD diagnosis in people who had both dementia and IBD. Our results showed that those with both conditions experienced a significantly faster decline in cognitive function. This decline became more noticeable after the IBD diagnosis. On average, people with both diagnoses lost nearly one additional MMSE point per year compared to those with dementia alone. This level of decline is comparable to the difference seen between people with dementia who take the new Alzheimer’s drug donanemab and those who do not.

Our findings suggest that IBD – and the systemic inflammation it causes – may contribute to a faster worsening of cognitive function. This highlights the need for closer monitoring of people with both conditions. Managing IBD effectively through anti-inflammatory medications, nutritional support and in some cases surgery, might potentially help reduce neuroinflammation, thereby slowing the progression of dementia.

While our results indicate that cognitive decline was significantly faster in people with both dementia and newly diagnosed IBD, it is important to note that this was an observational study, so we cannot establish direct causality. The study also had some limitations. For instance, we lacked data on IBD severity and the specific treatments patients were receiving. We also did not explore differences by gender, dementia subtype, or IBD subtype.

Additionally, since dementia is typically diagnosed in older age, the elderly onset IBD cases may have been underdiagnosed. Finally, while SveDem is a valuable national registry, it does not yet include all newly diagnosed dementia cases in Sweden.

Understanding how IBD influences the brain could open the door to new strategies for protecting cognitive health in older adults. Furthermore, identifying whether specific IBD treatments can slow cognitive decline may benefit people living with both conditions and could help with the refinement of care for this vulnerable patient population.

Iris Mikulic, Research Assistant, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet; Hong Xu, Assistant Professor at Division of Clinical Geriatrics, Karolinska Institutet, and Jonas F. Ludvigsson, Professor, Dept of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet

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

I recently asked myself if I’ll still have a healthy brain as I get older. I hold a professorship at a neurology department. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to judge if a particular brain, including my own, suffers from early neurodegeneration.

My new study, however, shows that part of your brain increases in size with age rather than degenerating.

The reason it’s so hard to measure neurodegeneration is because of how complicated it is to measure small structures in our brain.

Modern neuroimaging technology allows us to detect a brain tumour or to identify an epileptic lesion. These abnormalities are several millimetres in size and can be depicted by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which operates at around 30,000-60,000 times stronger than the natural magnetic field of the Earth. The problem is that human thinking and perception operate at an even smaller scale.

Our thinking and perception happens in the neocortex. This outer part of our brain consists of six layers. When you feel touch to your body, layer four of your sensory cortex gets activated. This layer is the width of a grain of sand – much smaller than what MRI scanners at hospitals can usually depict. When you modulate your body sensation, for example by trying to read this text rather than feeling the pain from your bad back, layers five and six of your sensory cortex get activated – which are even smaller than layer four.

For my study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, I had access to a 7 Tesla MRI scanner which offers five times better image resolution than standard MRI scanners. It makes snapshots of the fine-scale brain networks during perception and thought visible.

Using a 7 Tesla scanner, my team and I investigated the sensory cortex in healthy younger adults (around 25 years old) and healthy older adults (around 65 years old) to better understand brain ageing. We found that only layers five and six, which modulate body perception, showed signs of age-related degeneration.

Layer four, needed to feel touch to your body, was enlarged in healthy older adults in my study. We also did a comparative study with mice. We found similar results in the older mice, in that they also had a more pronounced layer four than the younger mice. However evidence from our study of mice, which included a third group of very old mice, showed this part of the brain may degenerate in more advanced old age.

Current theories assume our brain gets smaller as we grow older. But my team’s findings contradict these theories in part. It is the first evidence that some parts of the brain get bigger with age in normal older adults.

Older adults with a thicker layer four would be expected to be more sensitive to touch and pain, and (due to the reduced deep layers) have difficulties modulating such sensations.

To understand this effect better, we studied a middle-aged patient who was born without one arm. This patient had a smaller layer four. This suggests their brain received fewer impulses in comparison to a person with two arms and therefore developed less mass in layer four. Parts of the brain that are used more develop more synapses, hence more mass.

Rather than systematically degenerating, older adults’ brains seem to preserve what they use, at least in part. Brain ageing may be compared with a complex machinery in which some often used parts are well oiled, while others less frequently used get roasted. From that perspective, brain ageing is individual, shaped by our lifestyle, including our sensory experiences, reading habits, and cognitive challenges that we take on in everyday life.

In addition, it shows that the brains of healthy older adults preserve their capacity to stay in tune with their surroundings.

A lifetime of experiences

There is another interesting aspect about the results. The pattern of brain changes that we found in older adults – a stronger sensory processing region and a reduced modulatory region – shows similarities to neurodivergent disorders such as the autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Neurodivergent disorders are characterised by enhanced sensory sensitivity and reduced filtering abilities, leading to problems in concentration and cognitive flexibility.

Do our findings indicate that ageing drives the brain in the direction of neurodivergent disorders? Older adults brains have been formed by a lifetime of experiences whereas neurodivergent people are born with these brain patterns. So it would be hard to know what other effects building brain mass with age might have.

Yet, our findings give us some us clues about why older adults sometimes have difficulties adapting to new sensory environments. In such situations, for example being confronted with a new technical device or visiting a new city, the reduced modulatory abilities of layers five and six may become particularly evident, and may increase the likelihood for disorientation or confusion. It may also explain reduced abilities for multitasking with age, such as using a mobile phone while walking. Sensory information needs to be modulated to avoid interference when you’re doing more than one thing.

Both the middle and the deep layers had more myelin, a fatty protective layer that is crucial for nerve function and communication, in the older mice as well as humans. This suggests that in people over the age of 65, there is a compensatory mechanism for the loss of modulatory function. This effect seemed to be breaking down in the very old mice though.

Our results provide evidence for the power of a person’s lifestyle for shaping the ageing brain.

Esther Kuehn, Professor of Neuroscience, University of Tübingen

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

In less than four months, world-first legislation will ban Australian under-16s from certain social media platforms.

Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit and YouTube will all be off limits for children and teens.

It’s still not clear exactly how the restrictions will be implemented. But the federal government says social media platforms must take “reasonable steps” to delete the accounts of minors before or on December 10 and stop them from creating new accounts through age verification software.

Parents will not be able to give their consent to allow under-16s to use these platforms.

Not everyone’s a fan

Unsurprisingly, there has been a fierce debate about the potential benefits and risks of this ban on young Australians.

Regardless, the ban is here. Cutting back on screen time and social media will be challenging for many young people.

Research suggests social media allows young people to express themselves, develop their identity and seek social connection. In a society where two out five young Australians feel lonely, seeking out social support is crucial.

Equally, social media can be addictive and the “fear of missing out” can see young people engage more intensely on these platforms.

Here are five ways to prepare your child for the December 10 ban.

1. Don’t wait until December 10

The sudden removal of social media could be a shock to young people. So start the conversation as early as possible with your child and work together to create a plan on how to manage the ban.

Talk to kids and teens about why the ban is being implemented and how it will affect both their friendships and their daily routines.

This can help children feel informed, supported and importantly, heard.

Conversations could include gentle curiosity around the role of social media in their life, seeking their views on an impending ban, acknowledgement of the anxiety this might cause, as well as online safety.

Revisiting the topic in a series of smaller chats might also be helpful.

2. Fade out social media

Gradually reducing your child’s time on social media rather than suddenly stopping it will help them to adjust slowly and prevent feelings of withdrawal and frustration.

You could try reducing time spent on social media by a quarter each week and completely stop after one month. Families might opt to do this faster or slower.

By planning this approach together, your child can understand and accept it, making the removal of social media smoother and less stressful for the whole family.

3. Replace, rather than remove

Social media meets young people’s needs to socially connect with others, develop their identity, and belong to a community.

These needs will not disappear when the ban is introduced.

You could consider signing up to some other activities for regular social connection and a sense of belonging. These might include team sports, group hobbies, or volunteering. Consider creative pursuits such as art, music, or handicrafts so your child can express their identity.

4. Start offline connections

Normalise and encourage engagement within your communities that isn’t reliant on social media.

In US psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s divisive book, The Anxious Generation, he contends it is much harder to replace a child’s screen time with play if they are the only one in their peer group not using screens and in the park.

The ban presents an opportunity for parents to encourage and support children to build supportive offline groups together, where children can regularly connect in person. These could be connected to existing friends or newly established groups of like-minded families.

These groups can stick to the social media ban together and use alternative means of communication such as by phone, text or email.

5. Do it yourself

Children and young people absorb the behaviours and attitudes that are modelled to them in the home.

So this means parents can help by managing their own screen time, prioritising face-to-face connections with friends and family, and setting aside regular time for hobbies and activities.

This reinforces the importance of balancing digital and offline experiences. Modelling these behaviours consistently will help your child feel supported in the upcoming ban.

Micah Boerma, Adjunct Lecturer, School of Psychology and Wellbeing, University of Southern Queensland and Daniel You, Clinical Associate Lecturer, Child Psychiatry, University of Sydney

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

On Monday, the Federal Court of Australia handed Qantas a record fine of A$90 million for breaching the Fair Work Act by unlawfully terminating the employment of 1,820 ground workers during the pandemic.

The decision to impose this penalty – the largest ever issued under the Fair Work Act – marks the final instalment in a five-year litigation saga initiated by the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU).

Delivering the ruling, Federal Court Justice Michael Lee ordered $50 million of the fine be paid to the union, partly to act as a deterrent that “should encourage others to pursue compliance with industrial relations laws”.

The fate of the remaining $40 million will depend on a later hearing to determine if some or all of it should be paid to the sacked workers. That would be on top of $120 million in compensation already agreed.

A quick recap

This saga began in 2020, after the TWU launched an action alleging that Qantas had unlawfully terminated the employment of 1,820 ground handling workers when it made the decision to outsource the staff at the height of the pandemic.

The union argued Qantas made this decision because of the workers’ future right to engage in collective bargaining and take protected industrial action when their enterprise agreement expired.

At trial, Qantas failed to show that this reason had not been a substantial and operative factor in making the outsourcing decision.

This meant that in making the workers redundant, Qantas had breached the Fair Work Act 1,820 times – once for each affected worker. Qantas appealed this outcome all the way to the High Court, but ultimately failed.

Once Qantas had exhausted all rights of appeal, the matter was returned to Justice Lee to determine compensation for the affected workers. After much toing and froing between the parties, in December 2024, a compensation package totalling $120 million was agreed between Qantas and the TWU.

A meaningful deterrent

That left a final outstanding matter for the court – the “appropriate” penalty to be imposed against Qantas for breaching the law. The maximum penalty available for this breach under the Fair Work Act was just over $120 million.

To determine an appropriate penalty under the Fair Work Act, a judge must exercise a level of discretion and weigh up various factors. These include the nature, circumstances and consequences of the breach, the size of the business and the extent to which the contravenor has shown remorse.

So why the record fine? The size of this penalty is partly because there were so many workers affected by Qantas’ breach of the Fair Work Act.

But it also reflects Justice Lee’s view that there was a need for “real deterrence” to ensure big employers are not tempted to “get away” with unlawful conduct because the potential rewards outweigh the risks of getting caught.

‘The wrong kind of sorry’

On whether Qantas had shown genuine remorse, Justice Lee acknowledged Qantas had belatedly apologised for its conduct.

But the company’s formal expression of regret was described as “the wrong kind of sorry”. That is, the company seemed to be sorry they got caught and suffered financial and reputational loss, but not truly sorry for the effect of the unlawful conduct and its impact on the workers.

Justice Lee expressed scepticism that Qantas’ corporate culture had genuinely changed. In deciding to outsource its ground handling operations, Qantas was found to have been “lawyered from the start and up to the hilt”.

The judge noted that, throughout the litigation, Qantas pursued a vigorous defence, alongside an aggressive public relations strategy, continuing to deny any wrongdoing.

Justice Lee also observed that, at the 11th hour, even after the High Court decision had found in favour of the union, Qantas tried to deploy a strategy to ensure the affected workers received nothing.

It was only when facing the prospect of a massive fine, that Qantas expressed regret, putting forward evidence their corporate culture had changed. However, it continued to use the same legal team that came up with the outsourcing strategy.

In Justice Lee’s view, it was telling that no senior leaders who had been involved in the decision and remained with Qantas took the stand to explain what they had learned and why it would not happen again.

Ultimately, this outsourcing decision cost Qantas a combined amount of around $210 million in compensation and penalties. This figure does not include the millions of dollars of legal fees Qantas incurred in fighting the litigation.

But it was estimated outsourcing the ground handling operations saved Qantas about $100 million per year. In essence, despite being handed the biggest fine on record, Qantas still appears to be financially better off as a result of the unlawful outsourcing decision.

Portion paid to the union

Under the Fair Work Act, it is difficult to recover legal costs. This makes it challenging for unions, and others, to pursue litigation through the courts and hold companies to account.

The decision to pay $50 million – more than half of the penalty – to the TWU was made partly because the union took on the perils of protracted litigation. And, as Justice Lee pointed out, adverse action cases can be dicey. The outcomes are by no means certain.

Here, the union bore the risk and has reaped the reward. This means more money in the TWU coffers to pursue other employers who may breach the Fair Work Act. It is also an important signal to other unions, and worker representatives, that the benefits of enforcing the law may now outweigh the risks of doing so.

Shae McCrystal, Professor of Labour Law, University of Sydney and Tess Hardy, Associate Professor, Director of the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law, The University of Melbourne

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

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have used artificial intelligence (AI) to design two new antibiotics effective against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or “superbugs”.

This is a potentially exciting development, but it’s important to note there are several hurdles to overcome before we might see these antibiotics used in the real world. And if this eventuates, it’s likely to be some years away.

So how did the researchers harness AI to develop these antibiotics? Which superbugs will they target? And what happens next?

Antibiotic resistance is a global health threat

Frequent overuse of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture has led to the evolution of new strains of bacteria resistant to an increasing range of antibiotics. This global public health crisis makes the development of new antibiotics a significant challenge.

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs contribute to around 5 million deaths worldwide annually, and directly cause more than 1.2 million deaths.

It’s estimated superbug infections could lead to more than A$2.5 trillion in lost economic output globally by 2050.

Antibiotic resistance is also increasingly a problem of inequity, with many poorer countries unable to access newer antibiotics to overcome resistant bacteria.

Targeting 2 key superbugs

The researchers used AI to design antibiotics against two prominent superbugs: Neisseria gonorrhoeae and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

N. gonorrhoeae causes the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhoea, which has developed high levels of resistance to antibiotics in recent years. The inability to treat it effectively has contributed to a rapid spread of the disease. There were more than 82 million new cases in 2020, mostly in developing nations.

MRSA is a resistant strain of the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus (often referred to as “golden staph”). S. aureus can cause skin infections or serious blood and organ infections. Patients who get sick with the resistant MRSA strain are estimated to be 64% more likely to die as a result of an infection.

To address these challenges, the MIT team harnessed generative AI in two ways.

What did the researchers do?

The research team trained an AI algorithm, called a machine learning neural network, using chemical structures. We can think of this as similar to the way an AI language model would be trained using words.

The first approach, used for gonorrhoea, involved the algorithm screening a large database of existing compounds that had demonstrated antibiotic activity against N. gonorrhoeae. The AI algorithm then used the chemical structures of these compounds as “seeds” and built on them, generating new compounds by adding chemical structures one by one.

This approach led to 80 new candidate compounds, two of which could be chemically synthesised (meaning the scientists could make them in the lab). In the end, one of these demonstrated strong effectiveness against N. gonorrhoeae. It was able to kill the bacteria on a petri dish and in a mouse model.

The second approach, used for MRSA, started from scratch, prompting the AI algorithm with only simple chemical structures such as water and ammonia. The algorithm then predicted chemical structures that would interact effectively with vulnerabilities in the bacteria’s cell defences, and came up with entirely new antibiotic compounds.

Out of around 90 candidates, 22 were synthesised and tested in the lab. Six showed strong antibacterial activity against MRSA in a petri dish. The most promising compound successfully cleared an MRSA skin infection in a mouse model.

Advantages and challenges

An important element of this research is that the two new antibiotics are not just novel in their structure, but also in their mechanisms of action (in other words, how they work against the bacteria).

Traditionally, antibiotic development has relied on tweaking existing antibiotics. It’s hoped the fact these AI-generated molecules have entirely new mechanisms of action will make them more difficult for gonorrhoea and MRSA to evade.

Prior to this research, when it comes to antibiotic development, AI has mainly been used to narrow down libraries of already existing compounds or to modify chemical structures of currently used drugs.

While this work is very promising, several hurdles remain. Both antibiotics must undergo vigorous testing for safety and efficacy in humans through clinical trials, which will take several years and require significant funding.

Another challenge could be financial. As these antibiotics would be intended as “last resort” drugs to preserve their effectiveness, their market use will be limited. This limits the financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invest in their development and production.

Nevertheless, this work marks a significant milestone in drug discovery and is an example of how AI might reshape the fight against infectious diseases in the future.

Thomas Jeffries, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology, Western Sydney University

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

If you’ve spent time on social media recently you have probably been exposed to questionable “wellness” content. You may have been instructed to dip your toes in icy water or let the sun shine where it usually doesn’t.

Wellness trends such as drinking “loaded” water or taking ice baths may be benign for most people, while others such as drinking raw milk, eating raw organ meats, or taping your mouth while you sleep carry real risks.

The online spaces where they circulate can also be harmful, serving as breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination sentiment, and misuse of appearance- and performance-enhancing drugs.

It’s easy to dismiss followers of extreme wellness trends as gullible or misinformed. But research suggests personality traits may help explain why some educated, well-intentioned people sometimes reject conventional medicine in favour of fringe practices.

The big five personality traits

Psychologists have shown that many aspects of human personality can be described via five fundamental dimensions, of which we all have varying levels.

Two of these “big five” traits – openness and agreeableness – are particularly relevant to people’s interest in alternative health practices. (The remaining three traits are conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism.)

People high in openness are curious, imaginative and adventurous. They question tradition and are attracted to novelty and unconventional ideas. As a result, they are more likely to try new and unorthodox diets or treatments.

Highly agreeable people are trusting, cooperative and empathetic. They are very receptive to emotional messages, especially when they appeal to ideas of caring for others and benefiting the community.

These personality traits also influence how people search for and evaluate online information. People higher in openness tend to adopt an exploratory search strategy, preferring to seek novel or unconventional sources rather than relying on established information channels.

Because they value harmony, trust and maintaining relationships, highly agreeable people tend to give greater weight to information that comes from familiar or socially endorsed sources. They do so even when this information has not been critically evaluated.

Personality and persuasive influence

In the online wellness ecosystem, high levels of openness and agreeableness can make people susceptible to persuasion.

Influencers have a powerful advantage. They can position themselves as both novel and trustworthy. Open people can be seduced by original, eye-catching content, and agreeable people by community-focused narratives.

Influencers cultivate one-sided “parasocial” relationships in which followers feel an intimate connection with someone they have never met. These close bonds, coupled with the open personality’s attraction to unconventional ideas, can draw people into extreme, untested and unsafe health practices.

Openness to new experiences and being interpersonally agreeable are usually seen as strengths. However, in the buzzing, emotionally charged environment of online wellness culture they can become vulnerabilities.

From ice baths to anti-vax

Not all wellness practices peddled by online influencers are harmful. But some relatively innocuous trends can be a gateway to more extreme practices.

Someone might start taking ice baths for a mood boost, move on to restrictive raw diets for “clean eating”, and eventually arrive at anti-vaccine beliefs grounded in deep mistrust of health authorities.

Gateway effects can occur if a trusted influencer makes increasingly extreme recommendations. If the influencer pivots to more dangerous ideas, many followers will follow.

Over time, exposure to fringe wellness narratives can erode trust in mainstream institutions. What began as curiosity and warmth may, through repeated exposure to extreme content, shift towards cynicism and institutional mistrust.

How can public health messages adapt?

Public health campaigns sometimes assume people reject mainstream health advice because they lack knowledge or have low “health literacy”.

But if personality traits influence receptiveness to alternative wellness claims, simply giving people more information may not produce positive change.

Public health campaigns should consider personality traits for more effective preventive interventions. They can target people high in openness, for example, by presenting health science as dynamic and evolving, not just a set of rules and prescriptions. They can reach highly agreeable people with health messages that emphasise empathy and community.

To be effective for all of us, public health communication needs to be as engaging as the messages emanating from influencers. It must use eye-catching visuals, personal stories, and moral hooks while remaining truthful.

People who engage in extreme or unusual wellness practices aren’t merely misinformed. Often, they’re driven by the same urge to explore, connect, and live well as everyone else. The challenge we face is to steer that drive toward health, not harm.

Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate in Public Health & Community Medicine, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney and Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne

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

Videos promoting #testosteronemaxxing are racking up millions of views. Like “looksmaxxing” or “fibremaxxing” this trend takes something related to body image (improving your looks) or health (eating a lot of fibre) and pushes it to extreme levels.

Testosterone or “T” maxxing encourages young men – mostly teenage boys – to increase their testosterone levels, either naturally (for example, through diet) or by taking synthetic hormones.

Podcasters popular among young men, such as Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, enthusiastically promote it as a way to fight ageing, enhance performance or build strength.

However, taking testosterone when there’s no medical need has serious health risks. And the trend plays into the insecurities of young men and developing boys who want to be considered masculine and strong. This can leave them vulnerable to exploitation – and seriously affect their health.

What is testosterone?

We all produce the sex hormone testosterone, but levels are naturally much higher in males. It’s produced mainly in the testes, and in much smaller amounts in the ovaries and adrenal glands.

Testosterone’s effects on the body are wide ranging, including helping you grow and repair muscle and bone, produce red blood cells and stabilise mood and libido.

During male puberty, testosterone production increases 30-fold and drives changes such as a deeper voice, developing facial hair and increasing muscle mass and sperm production.

It’s normal for testosterone levels to change across your lifetime, and even to fluctuate daily (usually at their highest in the morning).

Lifestyle factors such as diet, sleep and stress can also affect how much testosterone you produce.

Natural testosterone levels generally peak in early adulthood, around the mid-twenties. They then start to progressively decline with age.

A doctor can check hormone levels with a blood test. For males, healthy testosterone levels usually range between about 450 and 600 ng/dL (nanograms per decilitre of blood serum). Low testosterone is generally below 300 ng/dL.

Diagnosing low testosterone

In Australia, taking testosterone is only legal with a doctor’s prescription and ongoing supervision. The only way to diagnose low testosterone is via a blood test.

Testosterone may be prescribed to men diagnosed with hypogonadism, meaning the testes don’t produce enough testosterone.

This condition can lead to:

• reduced muscle mass
• increased body fat
• lower bone density (increasing the risk of fracture)
• low libido
• erectile dysfunction
• fatigue
• depression
• anaemia
• difficulty concentrating.

Hypogonadism has even been linked to early death in men.

A manufactured panic about ‘low T’

Hypogonadism affects around one in 200 men, although estimates vary. It is more common among older men and those with diabetes or obesity.

Yet on social media, “low T” is being framed as an epidemic among young men. Influencers warn them to look for signs, such as not developing muscle mass or strength as quickly as hoped – or simply not looking “masculine”.

Extreme self-improvement and optimisation trends spread like wildfire online. They tap into common anxieties about masculinity, status and popularity.

Conflating “manliness” with testosterone levels and a muscular physical appearance exploits an insecurity ripe for marketing.

This has fuelled a market surge for “solutions” including private clinics offering “testosterone optimisation” packages, supplements claiming to increase testosterone levels and influencers on social media promoting extreme exercise and diet programs.

There is evidence some people are undergoing testosterone replacement therapy, even when they don’t have clinically low levels of testosterone.

What are the risks of testosterone replacement?

Taking testosterone as a medication can suppress the body’s own production, by shutting down the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, which controls testosterone and sperm production.

While testosterone production can recover after you stop taking testosterone, this can be slow and is not guaranteed, particularly after long-term or unsupervised use. This means some men may feel a significant difference when they stop taking testosterone.

Testosterone therapy can also lead to side effects for some people, including acne and skin conditions, balding, reduced fertility and a high red blood cell count. It can also interact with some medications.

So there are added risks from using testosterone without a prescription and appropriate supervision.

On the black market, testosterone is sold in gyms, or online via encrypted messaging apps. These products can be contaminated, counterfeit or incorrectly dosed.

People taking these drugs without medical supervision face potential infection, organ damage, or even death, since contaminated or counterfeit products have been linked to toxic metal poisoning, heart attacks, strokes and fatal organ failure.

Harm reduction is key

T maxxing offers young men an enticing image: raise your testosterone, be more manly.

But for healthy young men without hypogonadism, the best ways to regulate hormones and development are healthy lifestyle choices. This includes sleeping and eating well and staying active.

To fight misinformation and empower men to make informed choices, we need to meet them where they are. This means recognising their drive for self-improvement without judgement while helping them understand the real risks of non-medical hormone use.

We also need to acknowledge that young men chasing T maxxing often mask deeper issues, such as body image anxiety, social pressure or mental health issues.

Young men often delay seeking help until they have a medical emergency.

If you’re worried about your testosterone levels, speak to your doctor.

Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate in Public Health & Community Medicine, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney; Luke Cox, Lecturer in Sport Integrity, Swansea University, and Timothy Piatkowski, Lecturer in Psychology, Griffith University

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

How long has it been since you last cleaned your bathroom? If it’s been longer than you planned, you might see a build up of scum, slime or mould around your taps, between the tiles and on the edges of the bath or shower floor.

But why is this sometimes pink or orange? And can this pink slime make us sick?

Sometimes it’s mould

In some instances, the pink slime may be a microfungi (also called a mould) named Rhodotorula.

Rhodotorula is a yeasty little fungus that makes sticky red stains appear on plastics and other wet items left in storage too long, including your toothbrush.

The first part of it’s name, “Rhodo”, refers to its red appearance in nature and comes from the Greek work for rose. It can be found pretty well everywhere, including on and in the wet bits of your skin, as it thrives in humid nooks and crannies.

Most microbes need large amounts of nitrogen to survive. But Rhodotorula is excellent at scavenging nitrogen from its environment. It can survive with a fraction of the typical amount of nitrogen in its cells compared with other microbes.

This nitrogen scavenging allows it to persist in hostile and nutrient-poor environments, such as between your tiles where other microbes would starve. It also means it can pack itself full of lipids and nutrients when times are good, like gloopy little protein pills to survive the lean times.

Rhodotorula doesn’t pose a big risk for healthy people, but it can cause infection for those with weakened immune systems, such as patients hospitalised with catheters.

More commonly, it’s bacteria

The second and more likely candidate for pink scum in your bathroom is a bacteria called Serratia marcescens, another microbe that prefers to multiply in the damp and humid conditions found in bathrooms and laundries.

It’s also a scavenger of nutrients but in this case it scavenges phosphorous, a key component of DNA.

We’ve tried to reduce the amount of phosphates in detergents and soaps as they degrade waterways, but Serratia is excellent at wringing what little remains out of soap scum, or just happily living directly in liquid soap itself, while turning everything pink in the process.

Serratia was once a laboratory research tool. Scientists would puff clouds of the bacteria into the air or splatter it around to predict how a more dangerous bacteria might disperse. Serratia’s scarlet colouring made it easy to spot in lab tests.

But since then, Serratia has been recognised as an emerging pathogen. This means it’s an infectious agent we’ve only recently realised can cause illness, or we’ve only just worked out is actually the cause of a disease.

Serratia now ranks in the top ten most common causes of becteremia: bacteria in the blood. This starts with an infection, leading to sepsis, hospitalisation and sometimes death.

Serratia infections can start in a range of different ways: as a pneumonia, in the urinary tract, or from cuts and wounds. It can cause fever, chills and fatigue, and can be tough to treat due to antibiotic resistance.

Most people exposed to Serratia either won’t get sick or will develop only a mild infection. This may look like a cut that takes a long time to heal, or a phleghmy cough that hangs around but eventually goes away.

The US Army conducted studies where soldiers were exposed to concentrated clouds containing millions of Serratia and after a mild fever and chills, all subjects had recovered after four days.

A study over ten years in Canberra estimated the incidence of Serratia infections as 1.03 per 100,000 people, with similar rates of about 0.9 per 100,000 in Canada. So, in a given year about one person per 100,000 will get an infection from Serratia, which is roughly 2,800 people per year in Australia.

Most serious infections from Serratia occur in hospitals among people at a higher risk of infection because they’re immunocompromised, elderly or have other health conditions.

In a particularly chilling illustration of this, there have been hundreds of case reports of babies contracting Serratia infections in hospitals. In a 2005 outbreak of 159 babies in Gaza, almost half died.

What can you do about pink slime in your bathroom?

Although it’s impossible to live in a sterile environment, there are some simple things you can do to reduce the presence of these microorganisms in your home.

Drying wet areas can go a long way to slowing these critters down, as bacteria and mould need moisture to grow well.

Cleaning with detergents or disinfectants is very effective and is most successful after first removing soil and other debris. Don’t just spray bleach onto the muck and hope for the best; you’re better to scrub, wipe and then disinfect.

Or better yet, clean every two to three weeks (depending on how many kids, pets and roommates you have) to stop gunk building up and to starve these microbes of food.

Wearing dish-washing or disposable gloves during cleaning is a good way to reduce exposure, followed by washing your hands thoroughly with soap and water, and drying them.

Michael Taylor, Adjunct academic, mycology, Flinders University

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

Australia’s health workforce is under pressure. Wait times are growing. Burnout is rising. Yet the country is awash in policy – just not the kind that solves these problems at the root.

This can explain why you’re struggling to see a GP, can’t find a dentist, or struggling to coordinate care between a mental health professional and aged-care nurse.

These issues aren’t isolated problems. As we outline in research published in the Medical Journal of Australia, they reflect a deeper issue in how Australia plans and governs its health workforce.

Despite long-standing concern about shortages of health workers in both rural and urban areas, there’s no overarching national strategy for health workforce planning in Australia.

That’s the type of long-term strategy that helps a country make sure it has enough trained health workers in the right places to meet people’s health needs, now and in the future. Instead, there is fragmentation.

When we reviewed all 121 current federal health workforce policy documents, we found a patchwork of policies for specific professions (for example, doctors, nurses and midwives) that were often short term. These rely heavily on grants and programs rather than long-term strategies and operate in parallel rather than in concert.

They also don’t seem to pay attention to key professions – especially pharmacy, public health and emergency care.

So with more than 850,000 registered health professionals, there are still not enough to meet demand, particularly in regional and remote areas. This is also the case in sectors with rising demand, such as aged care, mental health and rehabilitation.

What should we do?

More than a decade of reports have recommended improvements to national health workforce governance or strategy. Our study shows why those recommendations still matter.

In 2025, the challenge isn’t just to add more staff – it is to coordinate the system and the policy better, and plan for a future where health care is sustainable, equitable, and fit for purpose.

Australia once had a national body to guide health workforce planning – Health Workforce Australia. It was established in 2009 but disbanded in 2014 (ironically) as part of a government efficiency drive.

Since then, the responsibility for workforce planning has been split across multiple government departments, statutory authorities, and state and territories.

For instance, five states have their own individual ten-year health workforce strategic plans.

Some professions have their own national strategies. There’s a national medical workforce strategy, a nurse practitioner workforce plan and a mental health workforce strategy. Others are still being developed, such as the allied health workforce strategy, which would cover health workers such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists and podiatrists.

But there’s no effective mechanism to ensure these strategies work together coherently – or to ensure important professions or service areas aren’t left behind.

More programs, fewer solutions

Of the 121 federal policies we analysed, 81% were time-limited grants, programs or sub-programs. These types of policies are typically designed to respond quickly to a specific gap – such as with scholarships, rural relocation bonuses, or individual professional development. But they’re not necessarily designed to create sustained change.

We found 23 policies that could set longer-term direction. But it was not clear how these relate to each other. Few documents cross-referenced one another or reflected on the way solutions in one would impact on the solutions in another.

Most federal documents focus on workforce supply – such as training or recruitment. Fewer tackle the arguably harder, but equally important, issues.

These include how to improve workforce performance, such as by addressing skills mismatch or under-use (where individuals are not able to use their qualifications or skills as part of their job), or how to better distribute staff across regions.

So what needs to change?

In Australia, the federal government funds most of primary care, aged care and Indigenous health. But states and territories employ most health workers. So governance is decentralised.

Private providers, Primary Health Networks (federal government-funded organisations that support services to meet local health needs) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Controlled services (which provide primary health care to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) add further complexity to the health workforce landscape.

So without national coordination, workforce policy and planning risks being reactive, inconsistent, and susceptible to political cycles. This risks focusing on what’s most visible, and apparently urgent, rather than what’s systemic and enduring.

Here’s what needs to change:

• Australia needs to re-establish a national body for health workforce planning, similar to the former Health Workforce Australia. A recent independent review agrees the current meeting of health ministers is not an effective way to govern health workers. Without a national hub, the current patchwork approach will continue

• policymakers must shift from profession-specific and short-term responses to a system-wide approach. This means recognising how different parts of the health workforce interact as part of a broader labour market, and how policies for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and allied health professionals need to work together, especially in rural and remote care

• we need fewer ad hoc grants that turn over with each new federal government. Instead, we need greater emphasis on durable strategies and agreements that can guide action over time, while allowing states and territories to adapt them if needed. These should be backed by clear data, and be evaluated and accountable.

Stephanie M. Topp, Professor, Global Health and Development, James Cook University; Lana Elliott, Senior lecturer, School of Public Health and Social Work, Queensland University of Technology, and Thu Nguyen, Research Fellow, Health Policy and Systems, James Cook University

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

There was much cause for celebration when no-grounds evictions were abolished in New South Wales on May 19.

Keeping a pre-election promise, the NSW government amended the state’s Residential Tenancies Act to end no-grounds evictions and add new reasonable grounds for termination instead.

In doing so, NSW joined the ACT and South Australia, which had recently abolished no-grounds evictions. Since then Victoria has also legislated to end no-grounds evictions.

Queensland has joined Tasmania in ending no-grounds eviction in periodic tenancies and the National Cabinet has adopted “genuine reasonable grounds for eviction” as part of its “better deal for renters” reform agenda.

But now, the NSW government has created a loophole for so-called “renovictions” that is big enough to drive a ute through.

Grounds for termination

In states and territories that have scrapped no-grounds evictions, landlords must have reasonable grounds to evict tenants before the rental agreement period is set to end.

The grounds include if a tenant has failed to pay rent or otherwise breached the terms of their tenancy agreement. They also include if the landlord is selling the property to someone who requires the premises to be vacant.

These grounds have been part of the law for decades.

Now NSW’s new grounds for termination include if the landlord:

• will make significant repairs or renovations to the premises
• is going to live in the premises (or a family member will)
• is offering the premises for sale regardless of who is buying it or whether they are prepared to retain the tenant
• will not use the premises as rented residential premises for 12 months.

These grounds mean landlords still enjoy a lot of control over their properties – and their tenants’ homes.

For example, if they want to evict the tenants to put the premises on Airbnb, they can, using the “no longer used as rented residential premises” ground.

And if they want to evict the tenant to make it easier to market the premises for sale – as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese controversially did last year – they can use the “offering for sale” ground.

And if they want to renovate, they can use that ground.

The ‘renoviction’ loophole

When the NSW government scrapped no-grounds evictions, landlords who wanted to use renovations as a premise for ending a tenancy were required to provide a written statement and at least one piece of evidence, such as a development application or a quote from a licensed builder or tradesperson.

However, on June 20, the requirement to provide evidence was quietly scrapped: a landlord now only has to provide a written statement signalling they intend to renovate the property.

This could be wide open to abuse.

The government made the change without any public consultation.

The opposition, Greens and independent MPs tried in parliament to reverse the changes, but were defeated by the government’s numbers in the Legislative Assembly.

The change is yet to be debated in the upper house.

Some 30 organisations working with tenants released a joint statement on July 19 criticising the change, stating:

Without the full evidence requirements for this prescribed ground for termination, there is a real risk that the government’s commitment to end no-grounds evictions and ensure renters have the rights and security they need will be undermined.

Other shortcomings that can impact tenants

Besides the problems associated with renoviction, there are other shortcomings in the new laws.

In eviction proceedings on the new grounds, there is no scope for the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal to decline to terminate a tenancy because of hardship and other circumstances. Only if the tenant can prove the termination notice is motivated by retaliation – a hard thing to prove – can the tribunal refuse to evict.

The tribunal should be able to balance the interests of a landlord against the hardship that will be experienced by the tenant – and decline to evict if the hardship is too great.

Victoria’s Residential Tenancies Act gives its tribunal scope to consider whether an eviction is “reasonable and proportionate”. This consideration has resulted in the tribunal refusing to evict families on the “offering for sale” ground, because the tenants could not find alternative accommodation and would likely be homeless.

Our research

We have studied tenants who had been evicted or threatened with eviction in the private rental sector, and found no-grounds evictions created enormous anxiety.

One interviewee had recently been evicted. He graphically expressed the disempowerment and frustration associated with landlords’ capacity to evict tenants without the need to give a reason:

The unbelievable rights that landlords have over you creates a constant state of anger and you feel violated. I live in a constant state of fear around housing security. There’s nothing you can do.

Our interviews illustrated that tenants, especially low-income tenants, were acutely aware they would struggle to secure alternative accommodation and could find themselves homeless if they were evicted.

Another interviewee, who was single and reliant on the disability support pension, captured this anxiety:

The fear of homelessness is so much closer now than it has ever been in my whole experience with renting in Australia because it’s just so unstable. You have no leg to stand on. You’re always unsure, and you could just get an email from the landlord at any time, or from the real estate agent, and just like that your whole reality’s shifted.

Our study highlighted just why abolishing no-grounds evictions was a major positive reform for tenants.

However, the possibility of renoviction, the various other grounds for eviction and the limited discretion of the tribunal means the power of landlords in NSW is still excessive.

Alan Morris, Professor, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney and Chris Martin, Senior Research Fellow, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

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

Last Saturday at 9:49am local time, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake occurred about 50km west of Gympie in Queensland. The earthquake was experienced as strong shaking locally, but did not produce any significant damage, likely because of the remote location of the epicentre.

However, the quake was felt far and wide and small aftershocks continue. More than 24,000 people across eastern Australia reported it, not only in the nearest big city (Brisbane) but as far away as Cairns and Sydney. This was the largest earthquake in onshore southeast Queensland since 1935, when an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 occurred near Gayndah.

Most of the world’s earthquake hotspots are near the boundaries between tectonic plates – places such as New Zealand, Japan and Indonesia. Here, earthquakes are frequent because of the immense forces where two plates collide or slide past one another.

But Australia sits in the middle of the Australian tectonic plate, far from any plate edges. So why do earthquakes still happen here?

Tectonically ‘quiet’ – but not silent

Australia is often seen as tectonically “quiet” and stable.

But this picture is only partly true. As Saturday’s seismic event shows, earthquakes do happen here, and Australia has a rich record of recent faults and seismic activity.

On average, Australia has an earthquake larger than magnitude 6.0 about once every seven years, and one greater than magnitude 5.0 roughly once a year. Geological studies of recent faults tell us that Australia could host an earthquake up to around magnitude 7.5.

What drives earthquakes in Australia?

Even though Australia is far from the edges of tectonic plates, the continent is still being squeezed and stressed by the large forces at those distant plate boundaries. These stresses travel deep into the plate and build up.

When the stress becomes too great, it is suddenly released along zones of weakness in the crust (known as fault zones). That release is what we feel as an earthquake.

The map below shows just how widespread earthquakes and active faults are across the continent.

The Australian stress field

Over the past four decades, scientists have built up a detailed picture of the stresses acting in the Australian crust. This comes from many sources including earthquake information, borehole data, mining sites, and large-scale engineering projects.

The results have been compiled in two projects: the Australian Stress Map and the World Stress Map. These show Australia’s stress patterns are highly variable and different from those of other continents.

Unlike some continents, where the direction of maximum horizontal stress tends to line up neatly with the movement of plates, Australia’s stresses twist and turn, changing direction across the country. Large-scale computer modeling shows this can be explained by the combined effect of tectonic forces at the edges of the Indo-Australian Plate.

Stress and earthquakes in Queensland

The recent earthquake occurred near Kilkivan, west of Gympie, in an area where many faults are aligned in a northwest–southeast direction. One of the most important of these is the North Pine Fault System, a wide zone made of many separate fault segments.

This network of fractures tells a long geological story of movement, stretching back millions of years, that has shaped the landscape of eastern Australia. Geoscientists believe the fault system is quite ancient – between around 50 million and 250 million years old.

However, there have been numerous modern earthquakes in the surrounding region, which suggests the fault system may still be active. The area has experienced several significant earthquakes in the past, including events in 1883, 1918, 1935 and more recently, 2015.

The maximum stress in this region is directed from northeast to southwest. The driving forces come from far beyond Australia.

The Australian tectonic plate is compressed from the north and east by the Pacific plate, particularly along boundaries near the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and the Tonga–Kermadec zone which stretches from New Zealand to Tonga. This compression reaches deep into Queensland.

It is these forces from distant plate boundaries that are behind Australian earthquakes like the recent one in Kilkivan, even though we are far from the world’s active plate edges.

Since Saturday morning’s earthquake, more than 15 aftershocks have been recorded. Most have been quite small, with magnitudes less than 2.0. A main shock of the moderate magnitude experienced near Gympie will typically produce an aftershock as large as magnitude 4.5, in addition to the many more smaller events.

So, as the crust adjusts to the changes in local stress produced by this earthquake, seismic activity is expected to continue for days or weeks, but with overall smaller and less frequent earthquakes as time goes on.

Mojtaba Rajabi, Senior Lecturer in Geoscience, The University of Queensland; Abbas Babaahmadi, Adjunct Research Fellow, Structural Geology, The University of Queensland, and Dee Ninis, Earthquake Scientist, Monash University

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

In July, the United States government made it clear that artificial intelligence (AI) companies wanting to do business with the White House will need to ensure their AI systems are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias”.

In an executive order on “preventing woke AI in the federal government”, President Donald Trump refers to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as an example of a biased ideology.

The apparent contradiction of calling for unbiased AI while also dictating how AI models should discuss DEI shows the notion of ideologically free AI is a fantasy.

Multiple studies have shown most language models skew their responses to left-of-centre viewpoints, such as imposing taxes on flights, restricting rent increases, and legalising abortion.

Chinese chatbots such as DeepSeek, Qwen and others censor information on the events of Tiananmen Square, the political status of Taiwan, and the persecution of Uyghurs, aligning with the official position of the Chinese government.

AI models are not politically neutral nor free from bias. More importantly, it may not even be possible for them to be unbiased. Throughout history, attempts to organise information have shown that one person’s objective truth is another’s ideological bias.

Lying with maps

Humans struggle to organise information about the world without distorting reality.

Take cartography, for example. We might expect maps to be objective – after all, they reflect the natural world. But flattening a globe onto a two-dimensional map means having to distort it somehow. American geographer Mark Monmonier has famously argued maps necessarily lie, distort reality, and can be tools for political propaganda.

Think of the classic world map that uses the Mercator projection, hung in every primary school classroom. It converts the globe into a cylinder and then lays it flat. I grew up thinking Greenland must be massive compared to the rest of the world.

In fact, Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland, despite appearing to be roughly the same size on this type of map.

In the 1970s, German historian Arno Peters argued Mercator’s distortions contributed to a skewed perception of the inferiority of the global south.

Such distortions could be an analogy for the current state of AI. As Monmonier wrote in his book How To Lie With Maps:

a single map is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data.

Similarly, a single large language model’s response is one of an indefinitely large number of responses which might be produced for the same situation or from the same data.

Think of the many ways a chatbot could formulate a response when prompted about something like diversity, equity and inclusion.

A built-in classification bias

Other historic attempts at organising information have shown the bias of their designers and users too.

The widely used Dewey decimal classification (DDC) system for libraries, published in 1876, has been known to be racist and homophobic.

Over the course of the 20th century, LGBTQIA+ books have been categorised under Mental Derangements, Neurological Disorders, or Social Problems in the DDC, with more recent efforts being made to eliminate outdated and derogatory terms from the classification.

Under Religion, roughly 65 sections out of 100 are dedicated to Christianity because the library where the classification was originally developed had a strong focus on Christianity. While Islam has an estimated 2 billion followers to Christianity’s 2.3 billion today, in the DDC Islam only has a single section dedicated to it.

AI learns from humans, after all

The large language models that power AI chatbots are trained on countless pieces of text, from historical works of literature to online discussion forums. Biases from these texts can unknowingly creep into the model, such as negative stereotypes of African Americans from the 1930s.

Just having raw information is not enough. Language models must be trained how to retrieve and present this information in their answers.

One way to do this is to have them learn to copy how humans respond to questions. This process does make them more useful, but studies have found it also makes them align with the beliefs of those who are training them.

AI chatbots also use system prompts: instructions that tell them how to act. These system prompts are, of course, defined by human developers.

For example, the system prompts for Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, reportedly instruct it to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and to not “shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated”.

Musk launched Grok to counter his perceived “liberal bias” of other products such as ChatGPT. However, the recent fallout when Grok started spouting anti-semitic rhetoric clearly illustrates that attempts to correct for bias necessarily replace it with a different kind of bias.

All this goes to show that for all their innovation and wizardry, AI language models suffer from a centuries-old problem. Organising and presenting information is not only an attempt to reflect reality, it is a projection of a worldview.

For users, understanding whose worldview these models represent is just as important as knowing who draws the lines on a map.

Declan Humphreys, Lecturer Cybersecurity and Ethics, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

Ever ordered a salad on a first date when you really wanted the burger?

Many of us eat differently when we’re around other people, often without realising it. Our food choices shift depending on who’s at the table, who’s watching, or who might see our food if it’s shared online.

This isn’t just about manners or appetite. Experts are increasingly interested in the ways in which meals aren’t just eaten, but are curated. Psychologists and nutrition researchers call this “performative eating”.

The most recent viral example of this comes from TikTok, in the form of performative matcha. These videos show young, well-dressed men roaming in public with a matcha drink in one hand and a novel in the other – ostensibly to look attractive to women.

What is performative eating?

Performative eating refers to how we choose or avoid certain foods based not on taste or nutrition, but on what we think it signals to others. Food can be a powerful tool to signal identity and build connection.

People might consume certain foods to send a message about their

• health – such as by opting for a salad to appear “disciplined”

• gender – such as ordering a steak or beer to look “masculine”, or avoiding a “feminine” dessert or cocktail

• morals – such as by eating plant-based, to emphasise environmental values

• aesthetic – such as when people curate meals so they will look beautiful on social media feeds.

The way we eat is often shaped by social influences. We are aware of some of these influences, such as when we choose certain foods to fit in with family or friends. Others happen without us even noticing.

The role of social media

Food has been performative for hundreds of years (maybe more) – especially considering the luxurious and decorative eating habits of royal families.

Social media magnifies the dynamics of performative eating. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are inundated with food content, from aesthetic smoothie bowls, and matcha creations, to viral “what I eat in a day” videos.

These posts don’t just entertain – they influence.

Viewers may copy the meals, lifestyles, or even the values of creators they admire. As such, social media doesn’t just reflect eating trends. It also helps create and reinforce them.

The psychology and sociology of food

As social beings, our eating habits are deeply influenced by social modelling, wherein we tend to mirror what and how much others eat – especially when we like them or feel similar to them.

Research has found that knowing what foods or drinks others have chosen can influence us to make similar choices. Research also suggests people typically eat more when dining with friends or family, compared to when they eat alone. This suggests familiarity and social connection play a role in how much we eat.

Our food choices are also shaped by broader cultural beliefs, or what society says is “good” or “bad”. Online trends such as “trad wives” baking sourdough, detox regimens, and strict diets such as raw foodism can represent ideals of “purity” or discipline, or a desire to belong to a a particular community.

The reverse of this is also visible in popular culture, where indulgence is celebrated. Take mukbangs – videos where people eat large amounts of (often unhealthy) food while chatting with viewers. Originating in South Korea, mukbang videos have become a global trend, with some videos getting more than 30 million views.

Research shows mukbang videos can shape viewers’ eating habits. A recent review of the evidence suggests that for some they are helpful as they can encourage regular eating, and reduce binge eating or loneliness. But for others, they can trigger restrictive eating habits, or relapses into what is called “loss-of-control eating”.

When does it become a problem?

Performative eating sits on a spectrum. Sometimes it’s positive to share in certain foods, such as to connect with friends or family, or to celebrate your culture.

But it crosses the line when most of the focus is on appearing a certain way to others. This influence is particularly strong among adolescents and young adults. People in these age groups are often still figuring out who they are and where they belong, so fitting in can feel very important.

There are a range of potential downsides to performative eating. In more extreme cases, it might lead to disordered eating and body image concerns. For example, striving to present a “perfect”, socially approved diet can spiral into rigid rules or restriction that undermine one’s mental and physical health.

Performative eating may lead to reduced food enjoyment, as meals become more about spectacle rather than moments of nourishment or pleasure.

It can also lead to food shortages or strain on food supply, as we’ve seen in past matcha shortages.

Reconnecting with food

Performative eating isn’t always harmful. But if you think it could be affecting your physical or mental health in any way, you can ask yourself these questions:

• am I consuming this food or drink because I enjoy it, or because I will be viewed a certain way for it?

• do I order what I actually want to eat, or what I think I should be ordering?

• what emotions do I feel before and after engaging with various food content online?

Parents and caregivers can help children build lifelong positive relationships with food by modelling healthy eating, avoiding food restrictions, and encouraging autonomy in childrens’ food choices.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland; Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University, and Pearl (Pui Ting) Wong, Accredited Practising Dietitian, PhD Candidate, Casual Academic | Culinary nutrition & adolescent wellbeing, The University of Queensland

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

Eighty years ago this week, Japan surrendered after nearly four years of war in the Asia-Pacific. For Australia, this meant the end of not only the war in the Pacific, but also the second world war that had begun six years earlier, in September 1939.

In that time, around one million Australians – approximately 15% of the population – served in the armed forces. Over half served overseas, with nearly 40,000 killed and more than 66,000 wounded.

But what do Australians today know about this epochal moment in our history? We surveyed 1,500 Australians aged 18 and older to find out.

Our study

The survey was conducted from late February to early March 2025 as part of our work at the War Studies Research Group, with the aim of measuring public understanding of Australian military history.

It covered the major conflicts in which Australians have been involved, from the Frontier Wars and colonial wars through to the more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We asked a range of questions to determine Australians’ knowledge of and engagement with national military history, how they learn about it, and their opinions on the commemoration of military events today.

Our survey data revealed that between 40% and 70% of respondents (depending on age group) had not formally studied Australian military history. This means it provides a good insight into how the average Australian views the country’s military history.

Australia’s most well-known conflict

Nearly 90% of our respondents were aware of the second world war. Around 80% were also aware that Australians had been involved in the conflict.

There were no significant differences by any demographic.

The first world war was the next most well-known conflict, ahead of the Vietnam War, indicating the dominance of these three conflicts in Australian popular memory.

Most of our respondents (55%) also indicated their desire to learn more about the second world war — and they think Australian schoolchildren should, too. More than two-thirds support its inclusion in the Australian school curriculum.

In this, the second world war is the exception. Respondents were not particularly interested in learning more about other events in Australian military history.

The second world war is also the only conflict for which a majority believe Australian involvement was in the national interest.

Pacific War dominates

Australians served globally during the war, from the Asia-Pacific to the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Middle East. However, our survey confirmed that although our respondents indicated they were aware of the second world war, their knowledge of key events within it varies.

The most well-known event in the Mediterranean was the siege of Tobruk, which was known by approximately 41% of respondents, well ahead of the battle of El Alamein (28%) in second position.

More surprising was the fact that another 42% of our respondents had not heard of any of the listed events. This included the siege of Tobruk, which is a hallmark event in Australian military history.

By contrast, the Pacific was more well-known. Fewer than one in five respondents indicated they had not heard of any listed event from the war in the Pacific.

The top three events in the Pacific were the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (67%), the bombing of Darwin (59%), and the atomic bombings of Japan (57%).

Still, there were some unexpected findings. We expected Kokoda to rank highly, but it ranked outside the top three.

Younger Australians less knowledgeable

A deeper dive into the demographic data, however, highlights stark differences among age cohorts when it comes to what they know about the second world war.

Awareness of events increased consistently in line with respondents’ age. Older Australians are more knowledgeable across the board. This means greater knowledge among those aged 60 and over lifted the overall average response across the board.

Over two-thirds of those aged 60 and over knew of the siege of Tobruk. By contrast, only 23% of those aged 30–39 were aware of the siege. The youngest cohort (18–29) fared only slightly better, with around one-third (31%) aware of Tobruk.

Likewise, around 90% of respondents aged 60 and over knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor, compared to just over half of those aged 18–29. In fact, Pearl Harbor was the only key event from the war that garnered majority recognition among respondents aged 18–49.

Kokoda and the prisoner of war experiences of Changi, the Thai-Burma Railway, and Sandakan were all little known among those aged under 50.

Younger respondents were also at times more than twice as likely not to have heard of any listed event in this theatre.

However, the youngest cohorts were not always the least knowledgeable. For instance, 10% of those aged 18–29 knew of the battle of Milne Bay, compared to only 3% of those aged 40–49.

Australian military history needs to be bolstered

Our survey shows the second world war now dominates Australians’ understanding of their military history. But Australians know little about events outside the Pacific, and knowledge is also significantly decreasing with each generation.

This suggests the need for a stronger focus on the broader narrative of Australia’s involvement in the second world war, especially in school curricula, if this pattern is to be reversed.

It’s important public awareness of these events goes beyond the major events and encompasses diverse perspectives. This will allow future generations to better understand our past and the complexities of war, and its impact on our world today.

Nicole Townsend, Lecturer in History, UNSW Sydney

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

After the Great War, Australians made pilgrimages to distant battlefields of Gallipoli and northern France. They paid their respects to the fallen soldiers who shaped our national identity.

After the second world war, new places emerged such as the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea; Changi, Singapore; and the Thai-Burma railway. They became synonymous with Australia’s wartime sacrifices in Asia and the Pacific.

However, few know about Yokohama War Cemetery – the only Commonwealth war cemetery in mainland Japan. This unique site was collaboratively designed and built by Australian and Japanese architects, horticulturists and contractors in the years following the war.

It marks one of the first acts of reconciliation between the two nations after hostilities ceased.

Reimagining the cemetery

Yokohama War Cemetery was established as the final resting place for more than 1,500 Allied servicemen and women. Most had died as prisoners of war in Japan and China, including 280 Australians.

About six kilometres west of Yokohama’s historic port, the cemetery sits within a thick pine and cherry tree landscape. After the war ended, Australian and American war graves teams scoured Japan to locate and identify the remains of the fallen. They were often found in the care of local temples near prisoner-of-war camps.

Between 1946 and 1951, a small team of Australian architects and horticulturists designed and constructed the cemetery. They were from the Melbourne-based Anzac Agency of the Imperial War Graves Commission (now known as the Office of Australian War Graves).

Many of these designers were recently returned servicemen.

They include young architects Peter Spier, Robert Coxhead, Brett Finney and Clayton Vize. All trained at the University of Melbourne’s Architectural Atelier, their fledgling careers interrupted by years of war service and at the agency. Others, such as Alan Robertson, endured years as a prisoner of war in Singapore then Japan.

These architects reimagined the flat expanse of the traditional British war cemetery. They arranged a 27-acre former children’s amusement park into five national burial grounds: for the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand–Canada, pre-Partition India, and a post-war section.

Eucalyptus trees towering above the mature foliage clearly identify the cemetery as an Australian endeavour.

Another important contributor was Alec Maisey, a former merchant seaman and New Guinea veteran. Maisey took on the horticultural duties for the Anzac Agency’s numerous war cemeteries. In New Guinea, Borneo, Indonesia, New Caledonia, the South Pacific and across mainland Australia, he left behind a lasting landscape legacy for the thousands of visitors.

An international collaboration

Australian designers collaborated with their Japanese counterparts to create a memorial landscape. They embedded the commission’s established lawn cemetery template into a Japanese style “hide and reveal” garden that conceals and reveals the view as you walk through it.

Impressed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of native Oya stone at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, modernist architect Yoji Kasajima introduced it at the cemetery.

Japanese-American Michael Iwanaga was the principal local architect for the cemetery and introduced the Australians to the social and cultural norms of Japanese funerary architecture.

The main contractor on the project, Yabashi Marble, was associated with Japan’s modernist architecture renaissance. They installed the interior stone for Japan’s parliament building.

Tokio Nursery was initially an importer and exporter of seeds, bulbs and plants. They turned to landscaping after the war, becoming the cemetery’s principal gardening and maintenance contractor.

These tentative first steps towards reconciliation between Australia and Japan were made through design.

The result was a war cemetery unique to Asia, combining Asian and Western funereal features and aesthetics in its design.

Through these encounters, the Australian designers’ gained a deeper understanding of Japan’s materials, flora and landscape. Working closely with Japanese architects, nurseries and contractors, their approach to and perception of their profession and Japan was transformed.

Among many cemeteries they designed throughout Asia, Yokohama was the place they often returned to and drew inspiration from in their personal lives.

Enduring reminders

War does not end with a victory or a battle. Some of the most difficult tasks are carried out by the seemingly obscure units of the Australian army. The Australian war graves services, undertook the recovery of the war dead, providing for their dignified burial in designated cemeteries.

Many of these spaces were designed and created during the last stages of the conflict.

War cemeteries are often activated only during commemorative anniversaries. Yet, they persist in serving as enduring reminders of the futility of war and the scale of a nation’s sacrifice. They trigger intergenerational memories for Australians.

For many Asians, however, these sites often represent an unwelcome age of imperial conflicts in which their service and sacrifice was often overlooked.

Yokohama War Cemetery stands as a testament to the collaborative efforts of Australian and Japanese designers in the aftermath of the second world war. It offers a unique perspective on the journey towards reconciliation and the power of design to bridge cultural divides.

The exhibition Eucalypts of Hodogaya is at the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, until August 2026.

Anoma Darshani Pieris, Professor of Architecture, The University of Melbourne and Athanasios Tsakonas, Sessional Tutor in Architecture, The University of Melbourne

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

Everyone knows her photo. For some it shows the cheeky smile of a young girl, “Miss Quack Quack”. For others, the image represents an enigmatic veil of mystery, similar to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Millions have read her diary, watched various renditions in theatres and on the screen, or visited exhibitions devoted to her story. Thousands queue in front of the house in Amsterdam, where she spent 760 days in the secret annex, hiding from the Gestapo and their Dutch collaborators.

People quote the most famous sentence from her diary, immortalised in the Hollywood film, saying that “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”.

The sentence was written in July 1944 by 15-year-old Jewish girl Anne Frank, three weeks before the capture of her family by the Nazis. It represents the innocence, perhaps naivety of an adolescent, who after the war became one of the most iconic symbols of the Nazi Holocaust.

The quote carries a universal message that good will eventually prevail. This has turned Anne’s legacy into an easily adoptable trope, serving activists and political agendas. But who, actually, was Anne Frank? And how did she differ from the “Anne Franks” that have emerged since the end of the war?

The Many Lives of Anne Frank – Ruth Franklin (Yale University Press)

Acclaimed author Ruth Franklin explores these probing questions in her newest book. She is to be commended for her sensitive treatment of a difficult subject and an attempt to get as close as possible to Anne’s personality and nature.

Franklin follows two paths. First, she reconstructs Anne’s life based on the diary and recollections of people who knew her. In the second part, she reveals the afterlife of the diary and “Anne Frank”, in different contexts and on different platforms.

She concludes that the “Anne” most people know, or imagine, differs quite significantly from the girl who lived in the secret annex and penned the diary.

The story

Annelies Marie Frank was born in 1929 in Frankfurt am Main to an affluent assimilated German-Jewish family. After the rise of Hitler and the introduction of the first racial laws, her parents Otto and Edith decided to take Anne and her older sister Margot to the Netherlands. They continued to live in Amsterdam despite the growing threat, even after the German invasion in 1940. Attempts to emigrate to the United States failed.

The mounting persecution kept restricting their lives. In early 1942, the Nazis began to plan deportations of the Jews to the east. In July, when Margot received a call to the transport to occupied Poland, the family decided to go into hiding.

They spent over two years in the secret annex, eventually accepting four more fugitives: the van Pels family, including their teenage son Peter, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer. They were supported by a group of people, including, most famously, Miep and Jan Gies.

The group, experiencing the constant tensions of living in the claustrophobic space, ran out of luck in early August 1944. They were betrayed, and the Nazis sent them to the transit camp of Westerbork, from where they continued on the very last train to Auschwitz. After a month, Margot and Anne were separated from their mother and sent to Bergen-Belsen in central Germany.

Their physical and mental state soon deteriorated. A survivor of Belsen later remembered the “two thin, shaven-headed figures” who “looked like freezing little birds”.

Shortly before the end of the war, typhus erupted in the overcrowded camp and Anne and Margot became its victims. Otto, liberated from Auschwitz, was the only survivor from the eight who hid in the secret annex.

The diary

Anne got the red-checkered diary on her 13th birthday, shortly before moving to the secret annex. She wrote only occasionally, but soon the diary turned into her constant companion. It was a place where she could express her feelings.

Written in the form of letters to an imaginary friend Kitty (identified by Franklin as a character in Cissy van Marxveldt’s popular books for children), the diary offers a vivid reconstruction of life in hiding, describing in detail the daily routine. It also allowed Anne to vent frustration from constant conflicts with her mother, Mrs. van Pels and Pfeffer.

Another prominent feature, dominating later representations, was her evolving relationship with Peter, which eventually turned romantic.

In March 1944, Anne heard a radio broadcast by the exiled Dutch education minister Gerrit Bolkestein, who asked listeners to keep documentary evidence about their life under the Nazis. Anne began to rewrite her diary, now with the intention of making it public. Franklin suggests that this turned the book into a memoir in the form of diary entries.

Anne had not finished when the raid stopped her efforts. Not all parts of the diary survived. At least one of the original volumes, covering over a year, is missing; it does, however, exist in the version Anne wrote after March 1944.

Several versions

Otto returned to Amsterdam in June 1945. After they received a confirmation that Anne did not survive, Miep Gies handed over Anne’s papers, which she had found in the annex. Otto decided to publish the diary but, in what Franklin calls “the most confusing and contested” aspect of Anne’s story, “betrayed” her legacy.

Otto combined both versions of the diary. He returned to the manuscript sections that Anne removed, including details of her romance with Peter. He softened the criticism of Anne’s mother and of Mr. and Mrs. van Pels.

Franklin believes Otto did so out of respect for victims. The last surviving pages from Anne’s diary, offering critical comments about her parents’ marriage, were made public only after Otto’s death decades later.

It took almost 40 years before a critical edition, comparing all the versions of the diary, was published by Dutch researchers. This necessarily raises the question of how far the Anne Frank people know from Otto’s version is different from Anne who lived in hiding and perished in Belsen.

Afterlife and projection

Despite initial scepticism, the diary immediately became a hit, especially in the United States. Soon there were efforts to turn it into a theatre play and film. Otto agreed, because he needed money to preserve the house with the annex.

The Broadway play premiered in 1955 and the Hollywood feature film in 1959. In the following decades, Anne’s story inspired scores of authors, but also activists who referred to the public icon in support of their agenda.

The immense publicity did not come without controversies. It has led, according to Franklin, to Anne becoming “whoever and whatever we need her to be”. Such efforts keep surfacing. Franklin is right to criticise those who deliberately aim to provoke, for example, by using Anne’s image in anti-Zionist campaigns.

The original theatre and film representations, according to some, intentionally universalised Anne’s story, suppressing her Jewish identity. This, according to Franklin, made the story more palatable to the American audience and reflected the American Jewish ideal at that time of full assimilation into American society.

Yet although Anne’s diary can speak to a multitude of audiences, it is a deeply Jewish story. Anne’s relation with her Jewish identity and Zionism was ambiguous, though she was aware of her background and wrote that they “will always remain Jews”. Margot, her sister, wanted to go to Mandatory Palestine as a maternity nurse; Otto in his later life was supportive of the Zionist project.

Another affair, more recently, focused on the parts of the diary where Anne expressed her desire to touch her female friend’s breast and kiss her. She also wrote about her attraction to female nudity in art.

There were accusations that Otto censored these parts of the diary, in an effort to deny the coming out of his daughter. This is unfair criticism. As Franklin shows, Otto included the entries, slightly modified, in the first US edition, even though Anne had removed them from the rewritten version of her diary.

Ironically, conservative circles in the United States have called for a ban of a graphic novel based on the book, calling it “Anne Frank pornography”. Franklin cautions us against such projections and reading too much into these comments. We simply don’t know enough about Anne and about how her sexuality would develop. In the diary, she repeatedly expressed attraction to several boys, including Peter van Pels.

The raid

These efforts only show how the popularised image of Anne keeps attracting attention. We still want to know more about her and solve all mysteries. In 2022, a Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, in cooperation with a former FBI special agent, published a book that claimed to solve the mystery of Anne’s betrayal.

Until today, the culprit has not been identified. According to Sullivan, the Annex eight were betrayed by a member of the Dutch Jewish Council. This compulsory community body has often been accused of collaboration.

The publication triggered a quick response from Dutch Holocaust historians who, in a long rebuttal, rejected Sullivan’s claim, calling it a baseless fabrication. Dutch and German publishers withdrew the book.

Who was the real Anne Frank?

The question ultimately remains unresolved.

Is it the girl who penned the first version of her diary to cope with the persecution and isolation in the annex? Is it the young woman, author of the second version, who matured too quickly because of a lack of contact with her peers? Is it the Anne that Otto, grieving after the loss of his whole family, reconstructed from the pages saved by Miep Gies?

Or is she one of the versions of her story produced at Broadway, Hollywood, by countless writers, and now even political activists?

We all suffer from cognitive dissonance. The only photos we have of Anne are those of a young girl from the time before the family went into hiding. But the Anne who wrote the diary was older, almost womanlike, physically and mentally. Miep Gies recalled that “she had arrived a girl, but she would leave a woman”.

Reading the diary, even though we know the end, we hope she will survive. We don’t want to know what happened after their capture. We don’t want to see her bald and emaciated in Auschwitz or Belsen.

At the same time, we know the story will end there. Franklin bitterly remarks that “readers already perceive Anne as if she were a figure in a book rather than a real person. To just about everyone, her life is of secondary importance to what we make of it.”

Perhaps we should just conclude, together with Franklin that Anne was a talented girl and “an accomplished and sophisticated writer – a deliberate, literary witness to Nazi persecution”. She had many virtues and vices.

She can inspire us, we need to learn about her, but we should respect her. We should not project onto her our current agenda, concerns or political views. We should “restore her as a human being”, and that’s exactly what Franklin does.

Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW Sydney

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

We are all familiar with cherubs – small, winged children that have a status in Western art history as angels.

But did you know this image you hold in your head of a cherub is completely unlike the cherubs of the biblical and medieval traditions?

Here’s what you should know about these mythical creatures.

Cherubs were originally fearsome

The Cherubs in the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament were fearsome creatures.

Each had four faces – those of a human, a lion, an ox and an eagle – and four wings.

By the 4th century within Christianity, angels had become creatures with two wings, sufficient to enable them to travel from heaven, where they usually resided, to earth, generally to bring messages from God to us.

In the order of heavenly beings constructed by Pseudo-Dionysius in the late 5th century, Cherubs were second in importance to the Seraphs, followed by Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels.

So, in the Dionysian order, Cherubs aren’t even angels, but are way above them, close to God. There, they supported the divine throne or the divine chariot by means of which God travelled around.

In a later tradition they, along with the archangel Gabriel, guarded the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Cherubs as we know them come from Putti

What we now call Cherubs in Christian art were originally depictions of Putti – chubby, male children – from Ancient Greece and Rome. We are most familiar with a Putto as Eros, Amor or Cupid, usually naked, winged and with arrows used to incite love.

Putti were re-introduced into the West by the Italian sculptor Donatello in 1429 in sculpture.

In his art, the Putti were spiritelli – what we would call “sprites” or “elves”. They were little creatures – playful, lively and mischievous – often associated with love.

Suddenly, the Putti were everywhere. They especially adorned churches, playing with their Putti friends in childish glee, singing and dancing to the music of the lute or mandolin, climbing on fountains, pouring water through a vase or through the mouth of a fish.

The wings of the Putti suggested angelic status to Christian artists. And so, within the history of Christian art, these Putti have been and are still called “Cherubs”. But we do not know how they came to be known by this name.

The Putti became child-angels

In the 15th century, when the classical Putti were introduced into Christian art, they were looked upon as child-angels rather than as Putti. That is, they were Christianised.

We find child-angels with haloes and multi-coloured wings surrounding Mary and Jesus in Bernardino Fungai’s The Virgin and Child with Cherubim, painted around the end of the 15th century.

We know child-angels best of all as the two playful infantile figures of the Sistine Madonna (1514) with coloured wings, where Raphael has added them into the painting almost, it appears, just for the fun of it or as an afterthought.

Even Cherubs are not always Cherubs

Although we now might refer to all of these winged child-angels as Cherubs, the artists who painted them likely divided them into various celestial creatures, classified in some cases by the colour of the clothing they wore.

Cherubs often appear in blue clothing and with Mary, the mother of Jesus – their blue clothing perhaps reflecting her traditional blue clothes.

Child-angels dressed in blue are often paired with child-angels in red, the traditional colour of the Seraphs, those of a higher angelic order than the Cherubs.

In the French court painter Jean Fouquet’s Virgin and Child (1452), Mary the Queen of Heaven and Jesus are surrounded by naked red Seraphs and, behind them, naked blue Cherubs. So here we have the two highest orders of celestial creatures, surrounding Mary and Jesus.

On occasion, we find Seraphic infants only in attendance on Mary, now as winged heads, with no Cherubic children present at all.

Giovanni Bellini, in a 1485 painting known as Madonna of the Red Cherubim – but better titled “the Madonna of the red Seraphs” – has red winged, red-headed child-angels, their bodies in the clouds surrounding the head of Mary. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the name “Cherub” became common for all these baby angels.

But to call these child-angels all “Cherubs” is a misnomer, still perpetrated in Western art history.

Most artists just depicted child-angels or even infant-angels, with no connection to the biblical Cherub. That said, some, when dressed in blue, are probably intended as Cherubs; others, when dressed in red, are likely meant as Seraphs.

The history of the Western art of celestial creatures needs to be rewritten as a consequence.

Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

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

Big tech company hype sells generative artificial intelligence (AI) as intelligent, creative, desirable, inevitable, and about to radically reshape the future in many ways.

Published by Oxford University Press, our new research on how generative AI depicts Australian themes directly challenges this perception.

We found when generative AIs produce images of Australia and Australians, these outputs are riddled with bias. They reproduce sexist and racist caricatures more at home in the country’s imagined monocultural past.

Basic prompts, tired tropes

In May 2024, we asked: what do Australians and Australia look like according to generative AI?

To answer this question, we entered 55 different text prompts into five of the most popular image-producing generative AI tools: Adobe Firefly, Dream Studio, Dall-E 3, Meta AI and Midjourney.

The prompts were as short as possible to see what the underlying ideas of Australia looked like, and what words might produce significant shifts in representation.

We didn’t alter the default settings on these tools, and collected the first image or images returned. Some prompts were refused, producing no results. (Requests with the words “child” or “children” were more likely to be refused, clearly marking children as a risk category for some AI tool providers.)

Overall, we ended up with a set of about 700 images.

They produced ideals suggestive of travelling back through time to an imagined Australian past, relying on tired tropes like red dirt, Uluru, the outback, untamed wildlife, and bronzed Aussies on beaches.

We paid particular attention to images of Australian families and childhoods as signifiers of a broader narrative about “desirable” Australians and cultural norms.

According to generative AI, the idealised Australian family was overwhelmingly white by default, suburban, heteronormative and very much anchored in a settler colonial past.

‘An Australian father’ with an iguana

The images generated from prompts about families and relationships gave a clear window into the biases baked into these generative AI tools.

“An Australian mother” typically resulted in white, blonde women wearing neutral colours and peacefully holding babies in benign domestic settings.

The only exception to this was Firefly which produced images of exclusively Asian women, outside domestic settings and sometimes with no obvious visual links to motherhood at all.

Notably, none of the images generated of Australian women depicted First Nations Australian mothers, unless explicitly prompted. For AI, whiteness is the default for mothering in an Australian context.

Similarly, “Australian fathers” were all white. Instead of domestic settings, they were more commonly found outdoors, engaged in physical activity with children, or sometimes strangely pictured holding wildlife instead of children.

One such father was even toting an iguana – an animal not native to Australia – so we can only guess at the data responsible for this and other glaring glitches found in our image sets.

Alarming levels of racist stereotypes

Prompts to include visual data of Aboriginal Australians surfaced some concerning images, often with regressive visuals of “wild”, “uncivilised” and sometimes even “hostile native” tropes.

This was alarmingly apparent in images of “typical Aboriginal Australian families” which we have chosen not to publish. Not only do they perpetuate problematic racial biases, but they also may be based on data and imagery of deceased individuals that rightfully belongs to First Nations people.

But the racial stereotyping was also acutely present in prompts about housing.

Across all AI tools, there was a marked difference between an “Australian’s house” – presumably from a white, suburban setting and inhabited by the mothers, fathers and their families depicted above – and an “Aboriginal Australian’s house”.

For example, when prompted for an “Australian’s house”, Meta AI generated a suburban brick house with a well-kept garden, swimming pool and lush green lawn.

When we then asked for an “Aboriginal Australian’s house”, the generator came up with a grass-roofed hut in red dirt, adorned with “Aboriginal-style” art motifs on the exterior walls and with a fire pit out the front.

The differences between the two images are striking. They came up repeatedly across all the image generators we tested.

These representations clearly do not respect the idea of Indigenous Data Sovereignty for Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander peoples, where they would get to own their own data and control access to it.

Has anything improved?

Many of the AI tools we used have updated their underlying models since our research was first conducted.

On August 7, OpenAI released their most recent flagship model, GPT-5.

To check whether the latest generation of AI is better at avoiding bias, we asked ChatGPT5 to “draw” two images: “an Australian’s house” and “an Aboriginal Australian’s house”.

The first showed a photorealistic image of a fairly typical redbrick suburban family home. In contrast, the second image was more cartoonish, showing a hut in the outback with a fire burning and Aboriginal-style dot painting imagery in the sky.

These results, generated just a couple of days ago, speak volumes.

Why this matters

Generative AI tools are everywhere. They are part of social media platforms, baked into mobile phones and educational platforms, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Canva and most other popular creative and office software.

In short, they are unavoidable.

Our research shows generative AI tools will readily produce content rife with inaccurate stereotypes when asked for basic depictions of Australians.

Given how widely they are used, it’s concerning that AI is producing caricatures of Australia and visualising Australians in reductive, sexist and racist ways.

Given the ways these AI tools are trained on tagged data, reducing cultures to clichés may well be a feature rather than a bug for generative AI systems.

Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University and Suzanne Srdarov, Research Fellow, Media and Cultural Studies, Curtin University

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

Have you ever walked face-first into a spiderweb while on a hike? Or swept away cobwebs in your garage?

You may recognize the orb web as the classic Halloween decoration or cobwebs as close neighbors with your dust bunnies. These are just two among the many types of spiderweb architectures, each with a unique structure specially attuned to the spider’s environment and the web’s intended job.

While many spiders use their webs to catch prey, they have also evolved unusual ways to use their silk, from wrapping their eggs to acting as safety lines that catch them when they fall.

As a materials scientist who studies spiders and their silks, I am curious about the relationship between spiderweb architecture and the strength of the silks spiders use. How do the design of a web and the properties of the silk used affect a spider’s ability to catch its next meal?

Webs’ ancient origins

Spider silk has a long evolutionary history. Researchers believe that it first evolved around 400 million years ago. These ancestral spiders used silk to line their burrows, protect their vulnerable eggs and create sensory paths and guidelines as they navigated their environment.

To understand what ancient spiderwebs could have looked like, scientists look to the lampshade spider. This spider lives in rock outcroppings in the Appalachian and Rocky mountains. It is a living relative of some of the most ancient spiders to ever make webs, and it hasn’t changed much at all since web-building first evolved.

Aptly named for its web shape, the lampshade spider makes a web with a narrow base that widens outward. These webs fill the cracks between rocks where the spider can be camouflaged against the rough surface. It’s hard for a prospective meal to traverse this rugged landscape without being ensnared.

Web diversity

Today, all spider species produce silk. Each species creates its own specific web architecture that is uniquely suited to the type of prey it eats and the environment it lives in.

Take the orb web, for example. These are aerial, two-dimensional webs featuring a distinctive spiral. They mostly catch flying or jumping prey, such as flies and grasshoppers. Orb webs are found in open areas, such as on treelines, in tall grasses or between your tomato plants.

Compare that to the cobweb, a structure that is most often seen by the baseboards in your home. While the term cobweb is commonly used to refer to any dusty, abandoned spiderweb, it is actually a specific web shape typically designed by spiders in the family Theridiidae. This spiderweb has a complex, three-dimensional architecture. Lines of silk extend downwards from the 3D tangle and are held affixed to the ground under high tension. These lines act as a sticky, spring-loaded booby trap to capture crawling prey such as ants and beetles. When an insect makes contact with the glue at the base of the line, the silk detaches from the ground, sometimes with enough force to lift the meal into the air.

Web weirdos

Imagine you are an unsuspecting beetle, navigating your way between strands of grass when you come upon a tightly woven silken floor. As you begin to walk across the mat, you see eight eyes peeking out of a silken funnel – just before you’re quickly snatched up as a meal.

Spiders such as funnel-web weavers construct thick silk mats on the ground that they use as an extension of their sensory systems. The spider waits patiently in its funnel-shaped retreat. Prey that come in contact with the web create vibrations that alert the spider a tasty treat is walking across the welcome mat and it’s time to pounce.

Jumping spiders are another unusual web spinner. They are well known for their varied colorations, elaborate courtship dances and being some of the most charismatic arachnids. Their cuteness has made them popular, thanks to Lucas the Spider, an adorable cartoon jumping spider animated by Joshua Slice. With two huge front eyes giving them depth perception, these spiders are fantastic hunters, capable of jumping in any direction to navigate their environment and hunt.

But what happens when they misjudge a jump, or worse, need to escape a predator? Jumpers use their silk as a safety tether to anchor themselves to surfaces before leaping through the air. If the jump goes wrong, they can climb back up their tether, allowing them to try again. Not only does this safety line of silk give them a chance for a redo, it also helps with making the jump. The tether helps them control the direction and speed of their jump in midair. By changing how fast they release the silk, they can land exactly where they want to.

To weave a web

All webs, from the orb web to the seemingly chaotic cobweb, are built through a series of basic, distinct steps.

Orb-weaving spiders usually start with a proto-web. Scientists think this initial construction is an exploratory stage, when the spider assesses the space available and finds anchor points for its silk. Once the spider is ready to build its main web, it will use the proto-web as a scaffold to create the frame, spokes and spiral that will help with absorbing energy and capturing prey. These structures are vital for ensuring that their next meal won’t rip right through the web, especially insects such as dragonflies that have an average cruising speed of 10 mph. When complete, the orb weaver will return to the center of the web to wait for its next meal.

The diversity in a spider’s web can’t all be achieved with one material. In fact, spiders can create up to seven types of silk, and orb weavers make them all. Each silk type has different material and mechanical properties, serving a specific use within the spider’s life. All spider silk is created in the silk glands, and each different type of silk is created by its own specialized gland.

Orb weavers rely on the stiff nature of the strongest fibers in their arsenal for framing webs and as a safety line. Conversely, the capture spiral of the orb web is made with extremely stretchy silk. When a prey item gets caught in the spiral, the impact pulls on the silk lines. These fibers stretch to dissipate the energy to ensure the prey doesn’t just tear through the web.

Spider glue is a modified silk type with adhesive properties and the only part of the spiderweb that is actually sticky. This gluey silk, located on the capture spiral, helps make sure that the prey stays stuck in the web long enough for the spider to deliver a venomous bite.

To wrap up

Spiders and their webs are incredibly varied. Each spider species has adapted to live within its environmental niche and capture certain types of prey. Next time you see a spiderweb, take a moment to observe it rather than brushing it away or squishing the spider inside.

Notice the differences in web structure, and see whether you can spot the glue droplets. Look for the way that the spider is sitting in its web. Is it currently eating, or are there discarded remains of the insects it has prevented from wandering into your home?

Observing these arachnid architects can reveal a lot about design, architecture and innovation.

Ella Kellner, Ph.D. Student in Biological Sciences, University of North Carolina – Charlotte

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

“Wake up y’all. The king is here!”

So proclaims Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s new film, Highest 2 Lowest, where Washington portrays a hip hop mogul, David King, who finds himself the centre of a high-profile kidnapping case.

Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic crime drama High and Low. In that film, Toshiro Mifune plays high powered executive Kingo Gondo, who, on the eve of the most important night of his career, receives a surprising phone call informing him that his son has been kidnapped.

Kurosawa’s film begins as a corporate thriller before transforming into a police procedural as detectives traverse the streets of Yokohama in the hope of solving the crime. At the same time, the film sees the director examining social tensions under the surface of reconstruction-era Japan.

More than just a historical document, the film stands up as a remarkable example in nail-biting tension, 60 years after release.

From America …

Kurosawa’s original film is already derived from an American source, adapted from King’s Ransom (1959), an instalment in a series of police procedural paperbacks collectively titled 87th precinct, from author Ed McBain.

The novel’s prose is streamlined and action oriented. Simple sentences like “The room was full of cigarette smoke” or “The 87th Precinct building was on Grover Avenue” read like blueprints for a screenplay.

McBain was a pseudonym for the screenwriter Evan Hunter, who would adapt many of his own novels, including King’s Ransom, for a short lived TV series of the same name which aired from 1961–62.

The series was a late entry in a trend of procedural TV shows popular in Eisenhower’s America, epitomised by The Naked City (1958–63) and Dragnet (1951–59).

… to Japan

The Japanese studio Toho bought the rights for King’s Ransom for US$5,000 in 1961. Kurosawa must have sensed the opportunity for second chance, having been disappointed in his earlier attempt to make a detective film with 1949’s Stray Dog.

However, believing McBain’s novel “wasn’t particularly well written”, he started to make radical adjustments.

The biggest change Kurosawa makes to the novel is to split it into two distinct sections.

In the first half, Kurosawa takes the majority of McBain’s novel and restricts it to the sleek living room of Gondo’s nouveau riche mansion. Gondo’s luxurious air conditioned home overlooks the sweltering overcrowded shanty towns of Yokohama – yet the curtains are often drawn.

This section resembles a chamber-play. Kurosawa’s masterful blocking of the actors forces the audience’s eyes to shift around the widescreen frame; examining each character’s reaction in real time to every gradual reveal of information.

In the second half, Kurosawa abandons the claustrophobia of Gondo’s living room and sends the investigation into the streets below. Abandoning the plot of the novel, this is when the film’s observations of contemporary Japanese society come to the forefront.

An era of Americanisation

The film comments on the “Americanisation” of Japan that took place in the postwar era. Following the end of American Occupation, Japan entered into an unprecedented period of production, prosperity and profit known as the Economic Miracle.

A huge demand for “Western” cultural and commercial goods reshaped much of private and public life. The “three sacred treasures” of domestic goods during the 1960s would be the colour television, the automobile and the air conditioner. The continued presence of United States Army bases allowed the proliferation of American comic books and magazines, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll records.

But for the Japanese, America was both a figure of aspirational culture, and of ongoing military control. During protests in 1960 hundreds of thousands protested against American military expansion. Violent clashes with the police ensued, and one young student was killed. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower cancelled a scheduled visit and Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi was forced to resign.

This split vision of America is almost directly reflected in the dual structure of High and Low. Gondo’s home represents desire; the streets of Yokohama represent violence, and Kurosawa employs the aesthetic of film noir in intensifying the anxiety of the urban environment.

The film was released one year prior to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which sought to reintroduce Japan onto the world stage, showcasing the country’s remarkable transformation.

Kurosawa presents audiences with the repercussions of such progression, asking us to consider the lives and choices of those who have been left behind.

And back to America again

Kurosawa’s films have proved fertile material for American remakes. Seven Samurai (1954) became The Magnificent Seven (1960 and 2016); Yojimbo (1961) became A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Last Man Standing (1996); and The Hidden Fortress (1958) was an inspiration behind Star Wars (1977).

High and Low has long been earmarked for an American remake. In 1993, Martin Scorsese tried to get a version off the ground, and in 2008 Scorsese tried to pass directing duties to Mike Nichols. Now finally, Lee’s version has premiered at Cannes and to positive reviews.

Kurosawa’s original film continues to impress over half a decade later.

It is ranked 77 on IMDb’s top 250 films of all time and is number six on a similar list from Letterboxd.

In late 2024, the film received a 4K restoration and, along with numerous other Kurosawa classics, was part of a Kurosawa retrospective across cinemas worldwide.

The film has had a remarkable shelf life. It has transcended not only its low brow source material but also language, culture and history.

If Lee’s remake manages to capture even a small portion of the original, then it’s sure to be a great film.

Kristian Ramsden, PhD Candidate in English, Creative Writing and Film, University of Adelaide

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

“We have copyright laws,” said arts minister Tony Burke last week. “We have no plans, no intention, no appetite to be weakening those copyright laws based on this draft report that’s floating around.”

He was referring to the Productivity Commission’s controversial floating of a text and data mining exception to the Australian Copyright Act, which would make it legal to train artificial intelligence (AI) large language models, such as ChatGPT, on copyrighted Australian work.

In the internet age, all that is solid melts into data, easily copied and distributed instantly across the internet. This includes the work of authors, songwriters and artists, ostensibly protected by the law of copyright.

“The rampant opportunism of big tech aiming to pillage other people’s work for their own profit is galling and shameful,” songwriter, author and former arts minister Peter Garrett told the Australian last week, in response to the Productivity Commission’s report.

He urged the federal government

to urgently strengthen copyright laws to help preserve cultural sovereignty and our valuable intellectual property in the face of powerful corporate forces who want to strip mine it and pay nothing.

I have researched how piracy, illegal streaming and remix culture violate these rights. Somehow, authors and artists have survived over 25 years of it. But AI poses a new threat.

AI companies pushing against copyright

“You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for,” United States president Donald Trump said at an AI Summit last month, launching his government’s AI Action Plan.

On July 23, he signed a trio of executive orders, including one on preventing “woke” AI in the US government, one on deregulating AI development (including removing environmental protections that could hamper the construction of data centres) and another on promoting the export of American AI technology.

Major AI companies, including Google and Microsoft, have put the copyright exemption argument to the Australian government.

Australian tech billionaire Scott Farquhar, co-founder of software company Atlassian and chair of the Tech Council of Australia, said in a National Press Club address on 30 July that our “outdated” copyright laws are a barrier for AI companies wanting to train or host their models here.

He explicitly called for a text and data mining exception like the one the Productivity Commission is floating.

What is an author?

In the early 19th century, English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the poet – or creative author – as an elevated representative of the human race: a cultural hero worthy of the highest respect. The genius author was a divinely inspired creator of completely original works. And the best way to understand the meaning of a work was to determine the author’s intention in creating it.

Tech companies promise their advanced AI systems are capable of creating new creative works. But for most of us, we read to find truths about humanity, or reflections of it.

“The interaction in your own mind, is very much with the author,” reflected arts minister Burke last week.

Roland Barthes, in his 1968 essay The Death of the Author argued language itself, in its constant flux and change, is what generates new work. He proposed a new model for the author: a scriptor, or copyist, who mixes writings, none of them original, so a new work is a “tissue of quotations” drawn from the “immense dictionary” of language. Ironically, in this way, Barthes predicted AI.

A shift in wealth

Established in the 18th century, copyright enabled an author, songwriter or artist to make a living from royalties. It was meant to protect authors from illegal copying of their works.

The 21st century marked a massive shift in the wealth generated by creativity. Authors, and especially songwriters, suffered an enormous loss of revenue in the period 2000-2015, due to online piracy. In 1999, global revenue for the music industry was US$39 billion; in 2014, that figure fell to $15 billion.

At the same time, the owners of online platforms and big tech companies – who benefited from clicks to pirate sites offering works stolen from artists – enjoyed soaring profits. Google’s annual revenue jumped from US$0.4 billion in 2002 to $74.5 billion in 2015.

Several author and publisher lawsuits are underway regarding the unauthorised use of books by to train large language models. In June, a US federal judge ruled Anthropic did not breach copyright in using books to train its model, comparing the process to a “reader aspiring to be a writer”.

Copyright law reformers in the US have proposed that because all creativity is algorithmic, involving the novel combination of words, images or sounds, then an AI model, which uses algorithms to generate new works, should have its works protected by copyright. This would raise AI-as-author to the same legal status as human authors. These reformers believe rejecting this argument betrays an anthropocentric or “speciesist” bias.

If AI models were legally accepted as authors, this would represent another blow to the esteem accorded human authors.

‘Erasure disguised as efficiency’

An AI model may be capable of generating works of fiction, but these works will be poor imitations of human creativity. The missing element: emotion. Works of fiction come from an author’s lifetime of experiences, from joy to grief, and the work engages readers or viewers on an emotional level.

The emotional capacity of an AI model: zero.

I have seen some atrocious AI-generated non-fiction books for sale on Amazon. The tell-tale signs are: no author byline, and sentences such as: “Since my dataset has not been updated since 2023, I cannot provide information past that date.” If someone buys those books, the publisher and Amazon will profit. No royalties will be paid to an author.

This is happening in other media, too. In the Hollywood Reporter last month, British producer Remy Blumenfeld told of a “showrunner with multiple global hits” being asked to rewrite a pilot generated by ChatGPT. He called it “erasure disguised as efficiency”.

In January, the US Authors Guild introduced an official certification system, for use by its members, to indicate that a book is human written. In April, the European Writers Council also called for “an effective transparency obligation for AI-generated products that clearly distinguishes them from the works made by human beings”.

In 2025, readers still flock to writers’ festivals, and we still esteem great authors as cultural heroes. But this status is threatened by AI. We must resist the possibility that human authors become mere content in AI systems’ datasets.

The ultimate degradation would be for authors to become unwilling data donors to AI. Big tech must be opposed in that ambition.

John Potts, Professor of Media, Macquarie University

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

Have you ever been part of a large group project? You might assume that with more people involved, the work gets done better and faster.

However, as more team members join the group, the effectiveness of each individual doesn’t increase. It doesn’t even stay constant – it gets worse. Many hands may make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth.

This paradox is known as the Ringelmann effect, named after French engineer Max Ringelmann who discovered it in the late 19th century. When he measured the force produced by students pulling on a rope, he found that as more students joined the task, the total pulling force increased – but the average effort per individual decreased.

This decline was due to two main factors: the difficulty of coordinating within larger teams, and “social loafing”, the tendency for individuals to reduce effort when they feel less accountable within a group.

But many animal species, from fish schools to lion prides, cooperate successfully in large groups. Could they somehow overcome this decline in efficiency?

If any animal could, it would be ants. In a new study published in Current Biology, we aimed to find out whether weaver ant chains suffered from the Ringelmann effect.

Group work – for ants

Ants are champions of collective action, seamlessly coordinating complex tasks across colonies of millions. And among all ant species, the weaver ants (Oecophylla smaragdina) are a standout example.

Weaver ants craft treetop nests by pulling living leaves together and binding them with larval silk. To do so, they form “pulling chains” – each ant gripping the waist of another with its jaws and pulling in unison. The mechanical advantage of these chains has never been investigated.

We encouraged ants to form chains to pull an artificial paper leaf attached to a force meter which continuously monitored their collective force output. As more ants joined and left the pulling team, we could see how the group’s output changed in real time.

We hypothesised that the force per individual would decrease as chains grew, an idea supported by previous ant research. For instance, fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) are known to link together into sticky, raft-like balls to survive floods. When researchers pulled apart balls of varying size, larger groups showed signs of the Ringelmann effect, displaying less resistance per ant as group size increased.

To our surprise, we found that as more weaver ants joined the pulling team, the total force increased as expected – but so did the force per ant. In other words, individual weaver ants actually became more effective as team size grew.

The weaver ants, it seems, are not only able to avoid the Ringelmann effect – they are “superefficient” in their teamwork.

A division of labour

How do weaver ants achieve superefficiency? Is it just a matter of adding more ants to the mix?

Not necessarily.

Superefficiency seems to depend on how ants arrange themselves. Weaver ants performed best when arranging into a single, long chain rather than several short ones.

We also noticed that the posture of ants differed depending on their position in a chain. Ants at the rear stretched out their hind legs – a posture which helps them passively resist the counter-force of the leaf.

Ants positioned in the middle or front of the chain instead maintained a more crouched posture, typically associated with active pulling. This pattern hinted at a division of labour within chains.

In our study, we propose a mechanism we call the “force ratchet”. The weakest link in pulling chains is not the ants’ connections to each other, but their grip on the ground.

When pulling alone, the maximum pulling force an ant can produce is limited by slipping. But in a chain, rear ants can act as passive resisters, increasing the contact to the ground and preventing slippage.

This allows the front ants to pull harder, storing and transmitting force through the chain itself. This division of labour locks in the force and prevents backsliding.

More is different

While speculative, our model provides a compelling new perspective on how teams might overcome the common pitfall of the Ringelmann effect, at least in the application of physical force.

Future experiments – such as varying the slipperiness of the ground or the leaf weight – will be critical to confirm our force ratchet hypothesis.

Our research has broad implications, especially for the field of autonomous robotics. In swarm robotics, teams of small, inexpensive robots are designed to collaborate to achieve tasks beyond the capabilities of any single group member.

Yet, so far, pulling robot teams have at best achieved linear scaling: doubling the number of robots doubles the force output. This means robots may not be suffering from the Ringelmann effect, but they’re also not “superefficient”.

Programming robots with ant-mimicking strategies – such as the weaver ants’ force ratchet – could improve their performance and allow machines to become more than the sum of their parts.

Our study also challenges the ubiquity of the Ringelmann effect. Sometimes, when it comes to teamwork, more is different. And for some animals at least, more really is better. If weaver ants were cooks, it’s fair to say they might just make the best broth.

Chris R. Reid, ARC Future Fellow, Behavioural Ecology, Macquarie University and Daniele Carlesso, Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

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

Australia is home to a unique bunch of native land mammals, such as koalas, wombats and wallabies. These furballs evolved in isolation on this island continent and have become Australian symbols.

But between 27 and 23 million years ago, the coastal seas of Australia were also home to sea mammals found almost nowhere else: whales.

But not just any old whales. These creatures were among the strangest of all whales, called mammalodontids. If alive today, mammalodontids would be as iconically Australian as kangaroos.

Recent fossil discoveries from coastal Victoria reveal that not just one or two species, but a cornucopia of these wonderfully weird whales once called Australia home.

Our latest find, a roughly 25-million-year-old fossil of a newly named whale species Janjucetus dullardi, joins their bizarre ranks. Our discovery is published today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Baleen whales without baleen

Today, some of the most iconic whale species, such as blue and humpback whales, are baleen whales. These ocean giants use hair-like structures in their mouths, called baleen, to filter plankton – their main food source.

By contrast, mammalodontids were small-bodied (no longer than three metres), big-eyed, and had short jaws lined with teeth. Despite this description, we know that mammalodontids were, in fact, baleen whales … that lacked baleen. They were like an offshoot from the main evolutionary branch leading to today’s toothless giants.

All mammalodontid fossils date from the late Oligocene epoch – 27 to 23 million years ago. And three out of four named species have been found on Victoria’s Surf Coast, south-east of Melbourne.

The first mammalodontid was found in 1932, and in 1939 was given the name Mammalodon colliveri. It had blunt jaw bones with extensive blood and nerve supply for face and lip muscles. Curiously, the teeth were worn down to the gums, suggesting it fed by slurping prey (along with abrasive grit) from the seabed.

In 2006, local naturalist Staumn Hunder found the first fossil of a species later named after him, Janjucetus hunderi. This whale sported a robust triangular snout with sharp teeth and powerful jaw-closing muscles.

If Mammalodon’s skull proclaims “I’m a sucker”, the skull of Janjucetus screams “biter and ripper”. It’s about as heavy metal as whale skulls get, departing radically from those of all other whales.

Although Mammalodon colliveri and Janjucetus hunderi hint at a surprisingly wide range of lifestyles for mammalodontids, the details of exactly how and when they became so different from other whales remain murky.

A tiny new whale

In 2019, school principal Ross Dullard found a whale fossil eroding out of rocks along the coast at Jan Juc in Victoria.

Dullard donated his find to Museums Victoria, where it was painstakingly cleaned and repaired in the laboratory so we could study it.

As we describe in our new paper, Dullard’s find is a mammalodontid like Janjucetus hunderi, yet with different enough teeth and ear bones to warrant the naming of a new species: Janjucetus dullardi.

Incomplete fusion between skull bones, minimal tooth wear, and open tooth root canals tell us the animal was not fully grown when it died, possibly being a juvenile.

But just how small was it?

Using an equation that takes into account measurements of skull width compared with the total length of whales, we predicted that Janjucetus dullardi was about two metres long – small enough to fit on a standard single bed.

This makes it the smallest fossil whale discovered in Australia, and perhaps the first fossil of a juvenile whale found here.

A warm-water paradise

Janjucetus dullardi and its fellow mammalodontids lived during the Late Oligocene Warming, between 26 and 23 million years ago. The coastal waters of Victoria were as warm as those off present-day northeast New South Wales, and the sea level was higher.

Small, toothy whales clearly didn’t mind this long summer of balmy, sunlit waters: 80% of the dozens of whale fossils found in Victoria from that era are mammalodontids – mostly unnamed species. In contrast, rocks of the same age in New Zealand have yielded just one mammalodontid from a century of intensive fossil whale collecting.

Unfortunately, the mammalodontid paradise was lost. By about 22 million years ago, mammalodontids had gone extinct, no longer playing a part in the ongoing saga of baleen whale evolution. Global cooling at about 23 million years ago resulted in lower sea levels and the loss of the mammalodontids’ shallow coastal habitat.

If we know how their story ends, the beginning is still a mystery. Our research on Janjucetus dullardi and its kin suggests mammalodontids must have originated long before the age of their oldest known fossils, maybe 34 million years ago.

We suspect that the cradle of their evolution was here, in splendid isolation off southern Australia – home of the mammalodontids.

Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator, Vertebrate Palaeontology, Museums Victoria Research Institute and Ruairidh Duncan, PhD Candidate, Palaeontology, Monash University

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

Celebrated film critic David Stratton has died at the age of 85. He leaves an indelible mark on Australian film culture, and Australian film culture left an indelible mark on him.

Over a long career, he had an intimate relationship with cinema, finding it a place of connection and a kind of shelter. It was where he spent time with his grandmother and time away from the family grocery business that loomed large over his future.

Stratton’s migration to Australia in 1963 as a 10 pound pom became permanent as he took on the role of director of the Sydney Film Festival from 1966 to 1983.

In that role, he shaped a generation of young filmmakers who would come to define the Australian New Wave. He found a new sense of belonging.

His 1980 book, The Last New Wave, is explicitly a homage to

the men and women who work in the Australian film industry [who] make up as fine a group of people as anyone would want to know.

Becoming a critic

The festival director role led to his relationship with SBS, who hired Stratton as a part-time feature film consultant from 1980 – an arrangement which he translated into on screen introductions for what became Movie of the Week, as well as Cinema Classics in 1983.

Here, he met producer Margaret Pomeranz, who became his professional collaborator, co-presenter and loyal friend. Their on-air partnership, lasting 28 years across the SBS and the ABC program, At the Movies, made them icons of Australian film culture.

In writing my book on At the Movies, I heard numerous versions of the question, “are you a Margaret or a David?” The collection of their reviews on Letterboxd can be searched by the tags “Oh, David” and “Oh, Margaret”.

A cultural icon

The words “cultural icon” can be over-used, but in the case of Stratton, the emphasis was on substance over show. He never finished high school or studied at university, but wrote three books on Australian cinema, two movie guides, and a biography, I Peed on Fellini (2008).

He was passionate and protective of film, no more so than when he was battling censorship. In the case of Ken Park (2002), because of restrictions on the viewing of the film, few could argue with the decision on the facts of the case. However, Stratton, who had seen the film, declared “We’re being lied to”.

Stratton was a seasoned critic and performer, and knew how to manage his persona. He worked as a film reviewer for The Weekend Australian for 33 years, was a regular reviewer for Variety from 1984 to 2003, using the moniker “Strat”, while also making contributions to The Age and segments on radio station 2UE.

Following the end of At the Movies, he ventured into reviewing on the internet through “David Stratton Recommends” a collaboration with art house film exhibitors in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, and he ran a history of world cinema course at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education, which he concluded in 2023.

Underpinning all of this is a commitment to the audience. He noted in interview:

I think everybody who is writing about film or talking about film is doing it for the audience that is reading or listening.

In praise of cinema

When I interviewed Stratton in 2019, giving generously of his time, he established quickly that he would only tolerate so much academic jargon and pretentiousness.

When we did The Movie Show, and I think Margaret would back me up, we were never wanting to intellectualise any of this. We wanted to get across to a wide television audience our love of film, or our disappointment in certain things. We always liked to praise films more than to not praise them, and we didn’t have the time or the inclination to analyse them in too much detail.

A cinephile before the age of DVDs and streaming, Stratton retained a certain puritanical approach to film, guarding its preciousness:

When I was growing up, films were hard to see. I would go to see a film in the cinema and very often that film, if it was not a huge success and therefore would be revived, you might not see it again, ever, unless it came on television.

This led to his famously obsessive system of notetaking and cataloguing.

This informed a certain conservativism, most famously expressed in his dislike of badly used hand-held cameras, but manifested in other ways.

It always amazes me when I see people watching movies on their mobile phone on the train and then they say they’ve seen the film. They haven’t seen the film obviously. If somebody thinks they’ve seen Joker on a phone, well good luck to them but they haven’t.

Stratton increasingly saw television reviewing as a demand on his other pursuits, not to mention his habit of watching a film a day.

A final farewell

We have in a sense been saying an extended farewell since the end of At the Movies in 2014.

Attempting to sum up a career is always difficult, but it is a responsibility Stratton lived with constantly. This is captured in one comment, perhaps the closest we will come to his philosophy of reviewing:

the reviewer has a big responsibility I think, a very big responsibility. Because after all it’s only their opinion, they’re obviously being honest – well they should be honest – with their opinion, but it only is their opinion and you’re talking about possibly destroying something that the people who created it spent years of their lives working on. It’s a pretty big responsibility.

This article draws on the author’s book At the Movies, Film Reviewing, and Screenwriting: Selective Affinities and Cultural Mediation, published by Intellect Press.

Steven Maras, Associate Professor in Media and Communication, The University of Western Australia

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

Alzheimer’s disease steals memories and devastates lives. Yet despite an abundance of research, the earliest brain changes that trigger this disease still remain unclear, making it challenging to find effective treatments.

But could lithium – a metal most of us know better for its use in batteries or as a treatment for mood disorders – play a role in cognitive health? New research shows that this mineral may play a key role in protecting against Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s is linked to the buildup of two harmful proteins: amyloid-beta and tau. Amyloid-beta clumps outside brain cells (neurons), forming sticky plaques that block communication. Tau twists into tangles inside cells, disrupting their structure and function. Together, they damage the delicate network of neurons that supports memory and thinking.

But for nearly a decade now, scientists from Harvard University have also been uncovering lithium’s unexpected importance in the brain.

Lithium is naturally present in small amounts in the brain. This lithium comes from our diet, where it’s transported through the bloodstream to the brain’s cells. But researchers have found that as people move from mild cognitive impairment – a stage often seen as a warning sign for Alzheimer’s – to full Alzheimer’s disease, their lithium levels drop. This loss of lithium appears to set off the cascade of changes that lead to memory loss and confusion.

This recent study now helps to explain why a loss of lithium is linked with Alzheimer’s disease. The study showed that lithium acts as a natural defender – helping to keep amyloid and tau in check. When lithium levels fall, the brain becomes more vulnerable to these toxic proteins.

Researchers uncovered this connection by conducting postmortem examinations of brain tissue taken from people who had been in different stages of cognitive health. Those with mild cognitive impairment had noticeably less lithium in their brains compared to those who had been in good cognitive health. Levels were even lower in Alzheimer’s patients.

Interestingly, they found that the lithium doesn’t just disappear. Much of it becomes trapped within amyloid plaques, which lock it away from the brain cells where it’s needed most. This means even if total lithium levels don’t drop drastically, brain cells may still be starved of its protective effects.

So to explore what happens when lithium is missing completely, the scientists then studied mice – both healthy mice and mice that had been genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms. They cut the mice’s dietary lithium by 50% and observed the results.

The effects were striking. Mice with reduced lithium showed faster amyloid and tau buildup, more brain inflammation and lost connections between neurons – all crucial for learning and memory. The genetically engineered mice also performed worse in memory tests.

At the core of this process is an enzyme called GSK3β. Lithium normally keeps this enzyme under control. But when lithium is low, GSK3β becomes overactive, encouraging tau to behave abnormally and form tangles that damage neurons. This enzyme acts like a switch, tipping brain cells toward disease if unchecked.

The good news is the study didn’t stop at identifying the problem. Researchers treated mice with lithium orotate, a form of the mineral that’s less likely to get trapped by amyloid plaques. This treatment prevented the harmful buildup of amyloid-beta and tau, reduce inflammation, preserved neuron connections and improved memory.

Lithium’s importance

This research recasts lithium as more than a forgotten trace mineral. It appears to be a vital guardian of brain health, protecting neurons and maintaining cognitive function throughout life. Disrupting lithium balance might be one of the earliest steps toward Alzheimer’s – even before symptoms show.

Lithium’s protective role isn’t entirely new. It’s been used in psychiatry for decades, particularly to manage bipolar disorder where it stabilises mood. But medicinal doses are much higher than the tiny amounts naturally present in the brain. This study is the first to reveal that even these small, natural levels have a crucial protective function.

Beyond Alzheimer’s, lithium supports brain growth, shields nerve cells, and calms inflammation, all important for healthy ageing. Keeping lithium levels stable could have wider benefits in preventing dementia and supporting brain resilience.

One reason lithium hasn’t featured prominently in Alzheimer’s research before is its simplicity. It doesn’t target one molecule but acts like a conductor, balancing multiple brain processes. This makes it harder to study but no less important.

The discovery that lithium deficiency worsens Alzheimer’s damage opens new possibilities. Unlike current treatments focusing on removing amyloid plaques or tau tangles, lithium replacement could boost the brain’s defences.

Lithium orotate is especially promising because it doesn’t get trapped by amyloid and delivers lithium where neurons most need it. Lithium salts have long been used safely in medicine, so this approach could be easy and accessible for older adults.

Still, it’s unclear why lithium levels fall in some people. Is it due to diet, genetics or another cause? Could differences in the natural levels of lithium in drinking water worldwide influence Alzheimer’s risk? These puzzles invite future research.

It’s also important to note that much of this work was done in mice. While animal models offer valuable insights, human brains are more complex. Clinical trials will be needed to see if lithium orotate can safely prevent or slow Alzheimer’s in people.

We also don’t yet know how supplements or diet might affect brain lithium levels over time, or if this would be practical as treatment.

Still, the idea that a simple mineral could delay or prevent one of the world’s most devastating diseases is both exciting and hopeful.

Rahul Sidhu, PhD Candidate, Neuroscience, University of Sheffield

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

If Anthony Albanese thought the government’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state would be a relatively smooth operation in terms of politics, he’s had a quick wake-up call.

Following Hamas’ predictable welcoming of his action, the prime minister now finds himself deep in a controversy that has exposed a degree of naivety in how he and his government are conducting foreign policy.

The pros and cons of recognising a Palestinian state at this point always involved matters of judgement rather than being straightforward.

Israel’s appalling overreach in Gaza invited the response from France, Britain, Canada and now Australia. As Chris Luxon, the conservative leader of New Zealand (now also considering recognition) put it, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost the plot”.

On the other hand, it was obvious Hamas could argue recognition of Palestine just showed what its October 2023 attack had achieved. And there was no reason to think Israel would be influenced by what these countries did. After all, most countries globally have already recognised a state of Palestine. It appears only the United States holds the power to sway Israel.

The pressure on Albanese to recognise a Palestinian state mounted over months. It fitted with his own inclinations, held from when he was a young radical, and with Labor’s rank-and-file stance, reflected in the party platform. Foreign Minister Penny Wong had been leaning in for a year.

Crucially, the worse the conflict in Gaza became, the more a sizeable section of the public seemed sympathetic to making the gesture. Then came the stands by the three like-minded countries.

In the end, the prime minister just seems to have wanted to get it done. “We just can’t keep going the same way. The world is watching. People are sick of it. It’s horrific watching that,” he said this week.

The stipulations he spelled out just weeks ago, when he signalled recognition was not imminent, were no longer preconditions.

He’d said then, “How do you exclude Hamas from any involvement there? How do you ensure that a Palestinian state operates in an appropriate way which does not threaten the existence of Israel?”

Instead, in announcing recognition this week, Albanese relied on assurances from the Palestinian Authority, in its public statements and a phone call he had with its leader Mahmoud Abbas. He also took to heart the Arab League backing a call for Hamas to disarm.

Australian recognition, which Albanese said would come at the United nations General Assembly in September, became unconditional.

Here’s where the naivety kicks in. If he’s really relying on the Palestinian Authority’s word, that is flawed, on two grounds.

History indicates its word is hardly its bond. And even if it were, there is no reason to think it could deliver its various undertakings, including its own reform. Moreover, the assumption of its dominance in a post-war Gaza depends on a lot of “ifs”. One of these “ifs” is the expectation of elections. But even then, Hamas might find a way to survive and win.

Things got messy for Albanese when Hamas reacted to his announcement. The prime minister had predicted that “Hamas will be totally opposed to this decision” on the grounds it didn’t support a two-state solution.

That always seemed unlikely. Hamas is taking what it can get at the moment.

The first reaction was from Hamas co-founder Hassan Yousef, who lauded the “political courage” of the decision, in a statement from his office to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Hamas would later deny any statement could have been issued by Yousef, something quickly picked up by Albanese, who warned the media against Hamas “propaganda”.

Then in a formal statement to the ABC, Hamas praised the move (saying it was “better late than never”) but wanted more. “We call on the Australian government to translate this recognition into concrete actions – by exerting diplomatic pressure to end the Israeli occupation.”

This will feed into the calls from the left to impose sanctions on Israel. (The government has already sanctioned two extreme-right Israeli ministers.)

The recognition announcement has closed off one issue, but opened others.

The opposition has been predictable in its rejection of the recognition. But the shadow cabinet’s decision to go further and say that in office it would reverse the recognition, rather than leaving that decision for the future, was unnecessary and unwise. By the time the Coalition finally gets back into power, who knows what the situation will be in the Middle East?

Incidentally, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s choice of Michaelia Cash as shadow foreign minister was a strange one. Maybe Cash, who is the Liberal leader in the Senate, pitched very hard for it. Whatever the reason, she is an unnuanced political operator in a portfolio that often requires nuance.

The Albanese government’s decision on recognition has put further distance between Australia and the Trump administration. While the PM might think the dysfunction in this relationship doesn’t matter much because of Australians’ low regard for Trump, it remains important to get it back on an even keel.

That is something Albanese should address when he is in the US in September – when he has promised to meet Abbas – whether or not he lands a meeting with Trump himself.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Youth vaping is a major public health concern in many countries, with New Zealand’s youth vaping rates among the highest in the world, and rising.

In 2017, 3% of New Zealanders aged between 15 and 24 vaped daily, but by 2024, this was up to 21.3%.

Globally, one of the main drivers is the promotion of vapes on social media. Like many other countries, New Zealand introduced vape advertising restrictions, including on social media, as part of efforts to curb this problem.

But vape manufacturers mirror the techniques of traditional tobacco marketing, including stylish branding, flavours and sponsorship, and use global channels to get around domestic regulations.

This raises the question of whether New Zealand’s rules can be effective in a globalised digital world.

Our new study investigates the content posted to the global Instagram account of British American Tobacco’s vape brand Vuse, which holds more than 25% of the global market. We identify and describe the marketing strategies used to promote the brand to a global audience.

Collaborations and sponsorship

We assessed the marketing strategies used by the account by analysing all posts made by @Vuse.Worldwide – including imagery, audio and text – during the year from August 2023 to 2024.

We looked for brand and influencer collaborations and posts with high engagement (likes and views). We found the company formed several high-profile collaborations as a major part of its marketing strategy.

The most notable collaboration is with the Formula 1 motor racing team, McLaren. As a key sponsor, the car is heavily emblazoned with the Vuse logo and is frequently promoted on the Instagram account.

Sharing content between the McLaren and Vuse Instagram accounts increased the @Vuse.Worldwide audience from around 17,000 followers to the nearly 14 million followers of the McLaren race team.

The four most viewed video posts in our study featured the motorsport partnership, with one clip viewed more than 225,000 times.

British American Tobacco has maintained a decades-long partnership with Formula 1, dating back to when traditional cigarette advertising was still allowed.

Social media influencers

The Vuse Instagram account also features other lifestyle and entertainment collaborations. In a series of posts related to music festivals, Vuse employed DJs, artists, digital content creators and social media influencers to create engaging and stylish videos and photographs.

The tobacco industry has undertaken music festival marketing for generations as an effective strategy to reach young people.

“Get ready with me” videos are popular on Instagram, especially among young women. Four of the ten most viewed posts on the Vuse account were in this style, featuring young women filming themselves selecting fashion, makeup and hairstyles, and explaining their choices or setting the video to popular music.

In these videos, the vape may appear only briefly, for example slipped into a handbag as the final touch before a night out. Yet this placement connects the product and brand with glamorous, fun or exciting settings, creating an important association between the brand and appealing lifestyles and experiences.

The influencers often shared this content directly with their existing followers.

Instagram policy requires users to disclose paid partnerships with the #ad hashtag or paid partnership tag. Of the nearly 700 times an influencer or brand was tagged in the posts, only 14 were disclosed in this way.

Workarounds and weak policies

Vape companies often use workarounds to bypass restrictions on marketing to maintain a presence in youth-oriented settings.

Instagram lists @Vuse.Worldwide as a verified account, based in the UK, where advertising standards permit only “factual” vape content on a company’s social media account, but paid influencer marketing and “imagery unrelated to the product” are banned. The official @Vuse.UK account appears to align more clearly with these parameters.

Instagram’s own policies on vape marketing are difficult to decipher, with complicated rules that leave significant loopholes. For example, vape advertisements and paid influencer marketing for vape products are banned on Instagram. However, these rules do not extend to the brand content on a company’s own account.

Our research shows Vuse uses the worldwide account to promote brand associations, an indirect but powerful form of marketing that sits outside Instagram policies. Cross-posting to other accounts enables Vuse to reach new audiences without paid advertising on the platform.

Researchers suggest social media policies are intentionally unclear to enable platforms and the industry to capitalise on lucrative, instant and borderless sharing of digital content to new audiences.

Dealing with these issues will require global cooperation to require social media platforms to prohibit vape marketing more broadly. It will also require active monitoring and enforcement of breaches to hold social media platforms and vape brands to account. Domestic laws and rules must also apply to international content.

Lucy Hardie, Research Fellow in Population Health, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau; Becky Freeman, Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney; Christina Watts, Research Fellow in Public Health, University of Sydney, and Judith McCool, Professor in Population Health, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

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

Recently, you may have noticed an increase in the number of shops selling tobacco in your area. Alongside cigarettes, these shops often sell vapes.

In July 2024, the federal government banned the sale of recreational vapes nationwide. The only way to get one legally is from a pharmacist. Some states also require a doctor’s prescription.

So why, then, more than a year on, are these stores still selling vapes, in broad daylight?

In short: it’s because restrictions on the supply of legal nicotine have created a black market so big that it’s grown beyond the capacity of regulators to effectively suppress.

Billions going underground

To better understand the demand for vapes, it’s useful to draw on a close historical parallel: alcohol prohibition in the United States.

In the 1920s, Prohibition did not stop the sale of alcohol, but instead created a thriving black market. Illicit alcohol was easy to obtain, and organised crime groups engaged in violent conflict over territory and market share.

A century later, evidence is mounting that Australia’s nicotine policy – now the most restrictive in the world – has similarly driven the expansion of a black market.

Just as Al Capone and his cronies were the main beneficiaries of Prohibition, billions of dollars are currently flowing into the pockets of organised crime groups who use that money to fund other serious criminal activity.

Just this week, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) seized more than A$40,000 of illegal vapes from a single retail outlet in the Melbourne CBD. It’s a drop in the ocean of a market estimated to be worth up to half a billion dollars in Victoria alone.

Illicit vapes are a major contributor to the “tobacco wars”: a violent, ongoing conflict between rival organised crime groups for control of Australia’s illicit nicotine market.

The huge profits to be made inevitably creates competition, which fuels violence, with more than 230 firebombings linked to the illicit tobacco trade, and a growing number of kidnappings, robberies and assaults since January 2023.

This conflict doesn’t just affect gangsters. There are significant impacts on legitimate businesses through extortion, loss of sales, property damage and rising insurance premiums.

And tragically, at least one innocent bystander has been killed by the so-called tobacco wars.

Persistently high demand

As with alcohol prohibition, the illicit market for vapes is sustained by strong demand.

Nicotine is the third most popular recreational drug in the country, after caffeine and alcohol.

Around 1.5 million Australians vape – the overwhelming majority over the age of 18.

Demand for nicotine is also persistent, with per capita consumption slowly trending upwards nationally since 2016.

Another part of the problem has been the failure of the government’s model for supplying “medicinal” vapes. (Intriguingly, alcohol was also available via prescription during Prohibition).

It failed because consumer demand for medicinal vapes is very low. More than 95% of people who vape source their products from the black market. This is likely due, in part, to bans on popular flavours, which adults prefer to the tobacco and menthol options available legally.

The enforcement problem

In response to the growth of the nicotine black market, state and federal governments have legislated increased penalties, which include up to seven years imprisonment and fines of more than $21 million.

As with Prohibition, increasing penalties has not meaningfully disrupted the demand and supply of illicit vapes.

Counter-intuitively, these laws actually help organised crime by creating economic opportunities that would otherwise be fulfilled by legal businesses.

Legislating penalties is easy. Actual enforcement is hard. Enforcement is also more important, with research showing certainty of punishment is more effective than severity in deterring crime.

The enormous scale of the vaping market makes it a nightmare for law enforcement and other regulatory agencies. Again, the lesson of Prohibition is that once a black market is widely established, it is extremely difficult to eradicate, even when exponentially increasing tax dollars are diverted to bolster enforcement.

It is possible that a wide-scale, sustained law enforcement-led crackdown on illicit nicotine products could have an impact.

This type of operation, however, would require significantly greater resources than the $340 million the federal government has allocated to combating illicit nicotine supply.

It would also divert police resources away from other, arguably more pressing crime problems.

The unintended consequences of such a move would be to push the black market for vapes further underground, as we have seen with illicit drugs. Research shows that raising the risks associated with operating in a black market can also increase potential profits for organised crime groups and make it more violent.

There are also risks to consumers due to the proliferation of unregulated products. Illicit vapes have significantly higher levels of nicotine than those typically sold in regulated markets as well as, in rare cases, potentially lethal adulterants, such as synthetic opioids.

History has shown us time and again that efforts to prohibit popular drugs, often driven by best intentions to protect moral or physical safety, often create more harms.

Keeping everyone safer

Prohibition was eventually abandoned as a policy failure. This wasn’t because it didn’t reduce alcohol consumption – it did – but because it created a range of other more damaging social, health and economic harms.

Policy-makers have not heeded these historical cautionary tales from Prohibition or the more recent example of the war on drugs.

There are better alternatives. Regulated consumer markets for vapes exist in many Western countries. Government health departments in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, for example, actively promote vapes as a less harmful alternative to cigarettes.

Well-functioning legal markets divert people away from illicit ones, providing both safer products and fewer opportunities for organised crime.

The current landscape demands more creative, innovative solutions from our governments. We should expect more than a simple reboot of failed policies from the past.

The challenge is that politicians must first admit that current policy settings are not working. Then, they can seek broad-based expert input, plus the thoughts of nicotine consumers who are most affected by these policies, to create more viable, effective alternatives.

James Martin, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Deakin University and David Bright, Professor of Criminology, Deakin University

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

“We have copyright laws,” said arts minister Tony Burke last week. “We have no plans, no intention, no appetite to be weakening those copyright laws based on this draft report that’s floating around.”

He was referring to the Productivity Commission’s controversial floating of a text and data mining exception to the Australian Copyright Act, which would make it legal to train artificial intelligence (AI) large language models, such as ChatGPT, on copyrighted Australian work.

In the internet age, all that is solid melts into data, easily copied and distributed instantly across the internet. This includes the work of authors, songwriters and artists, ostensibly protected by the law of copyright.

“The rampant opportunism of big tech aiming to pillage other people’s work for their own profit is galling and shameful,” songwriter, author and former arts minister Peter Garrett told the Australian last week, in response to the Productivity Commission’s report.

He urged the federal government

to urgently strengthen copyright laws to help preserve cultural sovereignty and our valuable intellectual property in the face of powerful corporate forces who want to strip mine it and pay nothing.

I have researched how piracy, illegal streaming and remix culture violate these rights. Somehow, authors and artists have survived over 25 years of it. But AI poses a new threat.

AI companies pushing against copyright

“You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for,” United States president Donald Trump said at an AI Summit last month, launching his government’s AI Action Plan.

On July 23, he signed a trio of executive orders, including one on preventing “woke” AI in the US government, one on deregulating AI development (including removing environmental protections that could hamper the construction of data centres) and another on promoting the export of American AI technology.

Major AI companies, including Google and Microsoft, have put the copyright exemption argument to the Australian government.

Australian tech billionaire Scott Farquhar, co-founder of software company Atlassian and chair of the Tech Council of Australia, said in a National Press Club address on 30 July that our “outdated” copyright laws are a barrier for AI companies wanting to train or host their models here.

He explicitly called for a text and data mining exception like the one the Productivity Commission is floating.

What is an author?

In the early 19th century, English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the poet – or creative author – as an elevated representative of the human race: a cultural hero worthy of the highest respect. The genius author was a divinely inspired creator of completely original works. And the best way to understand the meaning of a work was to determine the author’s intention in creating it.

Tech companies promise their advanced AI systems are capable of creating new creative works. But for most of us, we read to find truths about humanity, or reflections of it.

“The interaction in your own mind, is very much with the author,” reflected arts minister Burke last week.

Roland Barthes, in his 1968 essay The Death of the Author argued language itself, in its constant flux and change, is what generates new work. He proposed a new model for the author: a scriptor, or copyist, who mixes writings, none of them original, so a new work is a “tissue of quotations” drawn from the “immense dictionary” of language. Ironically, in this way, Barthes predicted AI.

A shift in wealth

Established in the 18th century, copyright enabled an author, songwriter or artist to make a living from royalties. It was meant to protect authors from illegal copying of their works.

The 21st century marked a massive shift in the wealth generated by creativity. Authors, and especially songwriters, suffered an enormous loss of revenue in the period 2000-2015, due to online piracy. In 1999, global revenue for the music industry was US$39 billion; in 2014, that figure fell to $15 billion.

At the same time, the owners of online platforms and big tech companies – who benefited from clicks to pirate sites offering works stolen from artists – enjoyed soaring profits. Google’s annual revenue jumped from US$0.4 billion in 2002 to $74.5 billion in 2015.

Several author and publisher lawsuits are underway regarding the unauthorised use of books by to train large language models. In June, a US federal judge ruled Anthropic did not breach copyright in using books to train its model, comparing the process to a “reader aspiring to be a writer”.

Copyright law reformers in the US have proposed that because all creativity is algorithmic, involving the novel combination of words, images or sounds, then an AI model, which uses algorithms to generate new works, should have its works protected by copyright. This would raise AI-as-author to the same legal status as human authors. These reformers believe rejecting this argument betrays an anthropocentric or “speciesist” bias.

If AI models were legally accepted as authors, this would represent another blow to the esteem accorded human authors.

‘Erasure disguised as efficiency’

An AI model may be capable of generating works of fiction, but these works will be poor imitations of human creativity. The missing element: emotion. Works of fiction come from an author’s lifetime of experiences, from joy to grief, and the work engages readers or viewers on an emotional level.

The emotional capacity of an AI model: zero.

I have seen some atrocious AI-generated non-fiction books for sale on Amazon. The tell-tale signs are: no author byline, and sentences such as: “Since my dataset has not been updated since 2023, I cannot provide information past that date.” If someone buys those books, the publisher and Amazon will profit. No royalties will be paid to an author.

This is happening in other media, too. In the Hollywood Reporter last month, British producer Remy Blumenfeld told of a “showrunner with multiple global hits” being asked to rewrite a pilot generated by ChatGPT. He called it “erasure disguised as efficiency”.

In January, the US Authors Guild introduced an official certification system, for use by its members, to indicate that a book is human written. In April, the European Writers Council also called for “an effective transparency obligation for AI-generated products that clearly distinguishes them from the works made by human beings”.

In 2025, readers still flock to writers’ festivals, and we still esteem great authors as cultural heroes. But this status is threatened by AI. We must resist the possibility that human authors become mere content in AI systems’ datasets.

The ultimate degradation would be for authors to become unwilling data donors to AI. Big tech must be opposed in that ambition.

John Potts, Professor of Media, Macquarie University

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

A stroke happens when the blood supply to part of the brain is cut off, either because of a blockage (called an ischaemic stroke) or bleeding (a haemorrhagic stroke). Around 83% of strokes are ischaemic.

The main emergency treatment for ischaemic strokes is a “clot-busting” process called intravenous thrombolysis. But this only works if administered quickly – ideally within an hour of arriving to hospital, and no later than 4.5 hours after symptoms begin. The faster treatment is given, the better the person’s chance of survival and recovery.

However, not everyone gets an equal chance of receiving this treatment quickly. Notably, research has shown ambulance staff are significantly less likely to correctly identify a stroke in women compared to men.

In a recent study, we modelled the potential health gains and cost savings of closing this gap. And they’re substantial.

The sex gap in stroke diagnosis

In Australia, about three-quarters of people who experience stroke arrive at hospital by ambulance. If paramedics suspect a stroke, they can take patients directly to a hospital which specialises in stroke care, and alert the hospital team so scans and treatment can start immediately.

Research has shown women aged under 70 are 11% less likely than men to have their stroke recognised by paramedics before they arrive at the hospital.

While younger men and women experience stroke at a similar rate, the symptoms they present with may be different, with “typical” symptoms more common in men and “atypical” symptoms more common in women.

Research has shown women and men are equally likely to present with movement and speech problems when having a stroke. However, women are more likely to show vague symptoms, such as general weakness, changes in alertness, or confusion.

These “atypical” symptoms can be overlooked, leaving women more vulnerable to misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, and preventable harm.

What we did

In our study, published recently in the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA), we used ambulance and hospital data from a 2022 MJA study in New South Wales. This is the study we mentioned above that showed paramedics correctly identified stroke more often in men than women under 70.

From this dataset, we identified more than 5,500 women under 70 who had an ischaemic stroke between 2005 and 2018. Using this group, we built a model to compare two scenarios:

1. the status quo, where women’s strokes are identified at the current rate of accuracy; and
2. an improved scenario, where women’s strokes are identified at the same rate as men’s.

We then projected patients’ health over time, including their level of impairment, risk of another stroke, and immediate and long-term survival.

Closing the diagnosis gap would save lives and money

When women’s stroke diagnosis rate was improved to match men’s, each woman gained an average of 0.14 extra years of life (roughly 51 days) and 0.08 extra quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), meaning an additional 29 days in full health.

Scenario two also meant A$2,984 in health-care costs would be saved per woman.

Scaled to the national level based on the number of women under 70 hospitalised with ischaemic stroke each year, closing this gap would mean 252 extra years of life, 144 extra QALYs, and $5.4 million in cost savings annually.

Some limitations

We didn’t have sex-specific data for every aspect of the model, which is in itself a telling sign of the lack of recognition of sex as an important factor in understanding disease. Because of this, we used combined data from both men and women in some parts of our model, which may have affected the results.

Further, the NSW data we used for rates of treatment with intravenous thrombolysis were higher than the national average, so our national figures may be slightly over-estimated.

Beyond stroke – why all this matters

The disparity we found is one example of a broader, systemic issue in women’s health: sex-based differences in diagnosis and treatment that favour men.

Too often, women’s symptoms are misinterpreted or dismissed because they don’t match a “typical” pattern. This can lead to delays, missed opportunities for early treatment, and worse outcomes for women.

In stroke, faster and more accurate diagnosis means people are less likely to die or require long-term care, and more likely to recover better and get back to their daily lives sooner.

So what can we do to close the diagnosis gap?

Investing in better training for paramedics and other emergency responders, so they can recognise a wider range of stroke presentations, could pay off many times over. Public awareness campaigns that highlight atypical stroke symptoms could also help.

Technologies such as mobile stroke units and telemedicine support may be part of the solution, but they must be implemented with attention to sex-specific needs.

Lei Si, Associate Professor in Health Services Management, Western Sydney University; Laura Emily Downey, Senior Lecturer, Health Economics and Policy, George Institute for Global Health, and Thomas Gadsden, Research Fellow, Health Systems Science, George Institute for Global Health

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

Too often in discussions about productivity, the care economy only gets mentioned as the problem child putting a drag on growth. This week, the Productivity Commission is seeking to change that narrative with the release of its fifth and final report ahead of the government’s economic reform roundtable next week.

The report, of which I am a co-author, is focused on delivering quality care more efficiently. The care economy is broad and includes health care, childcare, aged care, disability and veterans’ services.

Among our report’s recommendations are a new national screening clearance system for workers across childcare, aged care, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and veterans’ care. That would make it easier to stop people found to be unsafe from simply moving into another sector.

We also propose setting up a new independent advisory board to assess and provide advice on prevention and early intervention across the different levels of government.

By increasing productivity in the care economy, we can reduce current and future costs and, crucially, improve the quality of care for Australians.

Care is central to our lives – and our economy

More than two million Australians work in paid care-related roles. That’s 12% of the workforce: around one in eight workers.

The care sector contributes 8% of Australia’s gross domestic product and is growing fast.

Over the next 40 years, both the number of people working in the care sector and its value to our economy are expected to rise significantly.

Demand for care is growing, but so are the costs

Traditional measures of productivity don’t capture the full story in the care economy.

While care sector productivity is low when you just consider the amount of services provided, when you account for the quality of those services the picture is different. Adjusted for quality, previous commission research has found productivity in a subset of health care grew by 3% annually between 2011-12 and 2017-18 – far above the market-sector average.

While the quality of our services has improved, demand is rising – along with costs.

Increased demand for care services is being driven by an ageing population, rising chronic health conditions, changing family structures, and increased expectations for quality care and independence.

To provide high-quality care more efficiently, we should start by removing silos and enabling a more cohesive, efficient system.

A person might need aged care, disability support, and health services all at once. Our system needs to reflect that reality.

Improving safety and quality with national oversight

Different sectors of the care economy operate under separate regulatory regimes. Providers must navigate multiple audits, standards, and registration systems. Workers often need separate clearances for each sector.

This duplication wastes time and money. It limits workforce mobility. It makes it harder for users to access and compare services.

These fragmented systems can also mean unsafe workers slip through the cracks unnoticed – putting care users at risk.

We are recommending a national screening clearance system and national registration for workers in the aged care, NDIS, veterans’ care and early childhood education and childcare sectors – making it harder for a worker found to be unsafe in one sector to move to another without detection.

This would replace existing clearances such as working with children/vulnerable people checks.

Real-time continuous checking should be undertaken between renewal dates to ensure prompt action if a worker engages in inappropriate behaviour.

We also need a unified approach to worker registration across aged care, the NDIS and veterans’ care.

The commission found more than 42% of aged care providers are also registered NDIS providers, and 82% of veterans’ care providers operate in aged care and/or the NDIS. These are often large providers, delivering a significant share of services. Yet they must comply with separate systems, diverting resources away from frontline care.

All of this is not just about efficiency – it’s also about safety, trust, and quality.

Delivering better care more efficiently

Another key reform is collaborative commissioning, where organisations work together to plan, procure, and evaluate services based on local needs.

In this report, we focus on removing the barriers and supporting collaboration between the federally funded local primary health-care networks and the state-controlled local hospital districts.

Greater collaboration in health care can reduce potentially preventable hospitalisations.

Even modest gains could be transformative. Our report estimates a 10% reduction in preventable hospitalisations could save A$600 million annually. But the real value lies in better care: fewer gaps, smoother transitions, and services tailored to communities.

Prevention is the ultimate productivity lever

Perhaps the most powerful lever for productivity is prevention and early intervention. Stopping problems before they start, or before they escalate, can improve lives and reduce long-term costs across government.

The evidence for this is all around us: from housing-first models that reduce homelessness and hospitalisations, to early childhood programs that boost lifelong outcomes.

However, investment in one area is often not supported because benefits occur over a long timeframe, or accrue to different areas and levels of government.

To address this issue, we’re proposing a national prevention investment framework. A new national independent advisory board would provide expert guidance on the cost effectiveness of new and existing prevention programs.

We need better outcomes

Care is one of the most complex and consequential parts of our economy.

If we don’t act in the face of rising demand, we risk a future where care becomes unaffordable, inaccessible, and inequitable.

But if we embrace reform through aligning regulation, improving collaboration, and investing in prevention, we can build a care economy that delivers better outcomes at sustainable cost. This is what productivity growth is all about.

Angela Jackson, Social Policy Commissioner, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Tasmania

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

Australia needs to do better at preventing health conditions from arising and worsening, according to an interim report on delivering quality care more efficiently released overnight by the Productivity Commission.

But the commission’s interim report did not mention a greater role for the private health insurance in delivering more preventive health care.

This is despite and wanting to provide more out-of-hospital and preventive care.

What do health insurers want?

Currently, legislation prohibits health insurers from delivering certain types of health care outside hospital. This means they are mainly restricted to delivering care based in hospital, or what’s known as hospital-substitute care (such as hospital in the home arrangements).

But Private Healthcare Australia, which represents most Australian health funds, and one of its members Bupa submitted requests to the Productivity Commission for the government to remove these legislative barriers.

If these laws were changed, it would enable private health insurers to significantly expand their funding for out-of-hospital care. Bupa specifically flags primary care, chronic disease management, and community-based services.

Private health insurers argue that paying for more out-of-hospital care would reduce the need for costly hospitalisations, and save long-term health-care costs. It’s about shifting the focus from treating illness to maintaining wellness, a goal few would disagree with.

In fact, private health insurers are already allowed to cover preventive care. Many have apps for members to track their exercise, blood pressure and sleep, for example. They already provide extras care for preventive dental care, optical, acupuncture, physiotherapy, and perhaps in the future some more complementary therapies. Members can buy hospital care, extras care, or a general plan covering both.

But if a health insurer wants to include more out-of-hospital, GP-like services, this would mean covering more of the same benefits that Medicare already covers.

Is this a good idea?

This isn’t a new debate. Private health insurers have long tried to expand their role beyond hospital care.

However, the core concern with allowing private insurers to cover more out-of-hospital care is the very real risk of driving up prices of out-of-hospital care and creating a two-tiered system.

About 45% of Australians hold private health insurance to cover hospital care.

If private insurers start paying for GP-like consultations too, it is highly likely doctors’ fees would rise. This is because private funds would likely offer a higher payment schedule above Medicare rebates to attract doctors to their networks. This would cause the overall costs of a consultation to rise.

Those without private health insurance, who rely solely on Medicare, would face a shrinking pool of doctors willing to bulk-bill or charge a modest gap, leading to longer wait times, fewer available appointments, and a greater struggle to access care. This would also lead to higher private health premiums as insurers pass on the cost of the higher doctor fees to members.

We already see this dynamic in our hospital system. Surgeons, for instance, earn significantly more for procedures performed in private hospitals compared to public ones. This leads them to disproportionately allocate their time to the private sector.

So people with private health insurance often skip lengthy public waiting lists for elective procedures, while public patients face prolonged delays for essential care.

This disparity doesn’t just create inequities, it strains the public system even further. To entice expensive surgeons to dedicate more time to public hospitals, public hospitals have to pay some of them well above the standard salaries set in enterprise agreements.

This practice diverts precious public resources (funds that could otherwise be used for essential equipment, beds, or more junior doctors and nurses), reduces the overall quality of care for public patients, and increases waiting times further in the public system.

What would this do to Medicare?

Allowing private health insurers to expand further would fundamentally undermine the universality of Medicare. We would risk creating a two-tiered primary health-care system, replicating the very disparities and challenges that plague our hospital sector. So current laws should remain.

What is needed to deliver quality care more efficiently is for the government to significantly boost investment in preventive health care. Once chronic conditions set in, they are difficult to reverse and continuously drive up costs. This is something the Productivity Commission acknowledges in its interim report.

We also need to build truly integrated care. This would deliver seamless, coordinated health services around a person’s needs, rather than around individual providers or separate parts of the system.

Imagine a future where your GP, specialists, allied health professionals, and even social support services are connected, sharing information and working together on your care plan. This crucial approach reduces duplication, improves communication, and ensures people don’t fall through the cracks of a fragmented system.

These are the types of policies that would help make Australia’s health system more efficient, and help ensure Medicare delivers what it was intended to, without unnecessary duplication and the inevitable consequences.

The article has been updated throughout to more accurately reflect proposals to the Productivity Commission and the commission’s response. While Private Healthcare Australia has advocated for a greater role in out-of-hospital and preventive care, its proposal did not state it wanted to cover GP-like services.

Yuting Zhang, Professor of Health Economics, The University of Melbourne

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

Islands are natural laboratories where evolution can run rampant as plants and animals adapt to new environmental conditions and vacancies in the ecosystem.

This creates all manner of unique animals, although sadly extinction rates are high on islands and many species are now gone. Examples include a blind, flightless duck with a sensory bill (like a platypus) on Hawaii, and pygmy mammoths on islands off the coast of southern California.

The Rēkohu Chatham Islands, an archipelago 785 kilometres east of mainland Aotearoa New Zealand, are no exception.

The islands were once home to a rich assemblage of unique birds, with 64 breeding species at the time of human arrival. Some 34 species and subspecies were found nowhere else on Earth.

This includes the endangered parea Chatham Island pigeon and the extinct mehonui Hawkin’s rail.

Our new research adds a unique species of shelduck to this group and illustrates just how quickly birds can adapt to life on isolated islands.

The Rēkohu Chatham Islands rose above the waves, taking their present form, around 3.5 million years ago. The archipelago is an ideal place to observe how ecosystems form and new species evolve.

Many of the birds on Rēkohu are closely related to species found on the mainland, but were changed by their new island home. Some are subtly different, such as the extinct Chatham Island kākā, which had a longer bill, larger thigh bones and wider pelvis than its mainland cousin. This suggests it could still fly but spent more time on the ground.

Other birds underwent major changes, such as the extinct Chatham Island duck, which was large, flightless and had bony spurs on its wings which were probably used in fights over territory.

Evolution of the Rēkohu shelduck

Shelducks are a group of semi ground-dwelling ducks found in Eurasia, Africa, Australia and the New Zealand region. In Aotearoa, they are represented by the familiar pūtangitangi paradise shelduck.

During the 1990s, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa palaeontologist Phil Millener found isolated bones and associated skeletons of an extinct shelduck in the rich fossil deposits around the Chatham Islands archipelago. He noted the bones may belong to a new species and they were archived at the museum until scientific advances allowed us to test this idea.

We reconstructed the family tree to uncover the identity of the Rēkohu bird, using ancient DNA from its bones. As Millener hypothesised, the Rēkohu shelduck was most closely related to the mainland paradise shelduck. Its ancestors arrived on the islands a mere 390,000 years ago.

On evolutionary scales, 390,000 years is not a long time, but it was long enough for the Rēkohu shelduck to go down its own evolutionary path. Like the paradise shelduck, males were bigger than females, but the Rēkohu shelduck was taller and more robust. These changes meant Rēkohu shelducks were poorer fliers than their mainland cousins.

Flight is energetically expensive. It is often lost when the cost outweighs its advantages. This is part of the “island syndrome”, a suite of changes in bone shape and behaviour observed in island species. On Rēkohu, an abundance of food, strong winds and a paucity of large predators meant flying wasn’t as beneficial as on the mainland, where predators such as kērangi Eyle’s harrier, Haast’s eagle, whēkau laughing owl and adzebill abounded.

Over time, a preference to spend more time on the ground resulted in the wing bones of the Rēkohu shelduck becoming shorter, more robust and less able to support flight. At the same time, its leg bones became longer and more robust. The Rēkohu shelduck was on a trajectory to flightlessness when it became extinct shortly after humans arrived.

A rich Rēkohu waterfowl community

The rich fossil deposits on Rēkohu continue to reveal much about the history of the islands. There are likely more undescribed species awaiting discovery.

Our lab continues to investigate the fauna of the islands, with ongoing work to determine if an extinct falcon represents another unique Rēkohu bird.

Working with Indigenous communities is paramount if we are committed to the process of decolonising palaeontology. The shelduck’s scientific (Tadorna rekohu) and common (Rēkohu shelduck) names were gifted to us by the Hokotehi Moriori Trust, the tchieki (guardians) of Rēkohu biodiversity, with which they are interconnected through shared hokopapa (genealogy).

The discovery and naming of the Rēkohu shelduck helps connect the Moriori imi (tribe) with miheke (treasure) of the past, allowing people to reclaim some of the pages of their biological heritage that have been lost.

The Rēkohu shelduck is part of a rich native and endemic waterfowl assemblage (nine different species) that was present when people arrived. These birds are survived only by the parera grey duck. We are only just beginning to understand how the ecological community of the islands once functioned.

The Rēkohu shelduck was on a unique evolutionary trajectory when it went extinct after humans colonised the islands but prior to the arrival of Europeans and Māori. This is a fate shared by many of Rēkohu’s birds.

The discovery of the Rēkohu shelduck is a demonstration of the speed at which island species can be changed by their environment. It highlights both the distinctiveness of Rēkohu animals and their close relationship with mainland Aotearoa New Zealand.

Nic Rawlence, Associate Professor in Ancient DNA, University of Otago; Alan Tennyson, Curator of Vertebrates, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; Levi Lanauze, Chief executive of Hokotehi Moriori Trust, Indigenous Knowledge, and Pascale Lubbe, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Molecular Ecology, University of Otago

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

Drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro (known as semaglutide and tirzepatide) have changed the way clinicians manage diabetes and obesity around the world.

Collectively known as GLP-1 agonists, these drugs mimic the hormone GLP-1. This limits both hunger and interest in food, helping users lose weight, and helps control blood sugar levels.

But two new studies published today show that people taking these drugs may have a small increased risk of serious eye conditions and vision loss.

Here’s what you need to know if you’re taking or considering these medications.

What damage can occur?

Non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, is a rare but devastating eye condition that occurs when blood flow to the optic nerve is suddenly reduced or blocked. It’s also called an “eye stroke”.

The exact cause of NAION remains unclear and there are no current treatments available. People with diabetes are at increased risk of developing NAION.

Unlike other eye conditions that develop gradually, NAION causes a sudden, painless loss of vision. Patients typically notice the condition when they wake up and discover they’ve lost vision in one eye.

Vision tends to worsen over a couple of weeks and slowly stabilises. Recovery of vision is variable, but around 70% of people do not experience improvement in their vision.

What has previous research shown?

A previous study from 2024 found participants prescribed semaglutide for diabetes were four times more likely to develop NAION. For those taking it for weight loss, the risk was almost eight times higher.

In June, the European Medicines Agency concluded NAION represented a “very rare” side effect of semaglutide medications: a one in 10,000 chance. In a first for medicines regulators, the agency now requires product labels to include NAION as a documented risk.

However the recent studies suggest the risks may be lower than we first thought.

In addition to NAION, there is also evidence to suggest GLP-1 drugs can worsen diabetic eye disease, also known as diabetic retinopathy. This occurs when high blood sugar levels damage the small blood vessels in the retina, which can lead to vision loss.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but rapid blood sugar reductions can also destabilise the fragile blood vessels in the retina and lead to bleeding.

What do the new studies say?

Two newly published studies investigated people with type 2 diabetes living in the United States over two years. The studies looked at the medical records of 159,000 to 185,000 people.

One study found semaglutide or tirzepatide was associated with a more modest risk of developing NAION than previously thought. Of 159,000 people with type 2 diabetes who were taking these drugs, 35 people (0.04%) developed NAION, compared with 19 patients (0.02%) in the comparison group.

The researchers also found an increased risk of developing “other optic nerve disorders”. However, it’s unclear what kind of optic nerve disorders this includes, as the medical record codes used didn’t specify.

Counter to this, the second study did not find an increased risk of NAION among those taking GLP-1 drugs.

However, the researchers found a small increase in the number of people developing diabetic retinopathy in those prescribed GLP-1 drugs.

But overall, participants on GLP-1 drugs experienced fewer sight-threatening complications related to their diabetic retinopathy and required less invasive eye treatments compared to the group taking other diabetes medications.

Further studies are still needed to understand how GLP-1 drugs can lead to eye complications. A current, five-year clinical trial is studying the long-term effects of semaglutides and diabetic eye disease in 1,500 people, which should tell us more about the ocular risks in the future.

What does this mean for people taking GLP-1 drugs?

NAION is a serious condition. But we need to strike a balance between these (and other) risks and the benefits of GLP-1 medications in diabetes care, obesity treatment, reducing heart attack risks and extending lives.

The key lies in informed decision-making and identifying different levels of risk.

People with multiple NAION risk factors – such as sleep apnoea, high blood pressure and diabetes – should undergo careful consideration with their treating doctor before starting these medications.

“Crowded” optic nerve heads are also a risk factor for NAION. This is an anatomical feature where blood vessels at the optic nerve head are tightly packed together. People with crowded optic nerve heads should also undergo careful consideration before starting GLP-1 medications.

Although NAION can strike without warning, regular comprehensive eye examinations with your optometrist or ophthalmologist still serve important purposes. They can detect other drug-related eye problems, including worsening diabetic retinopathy, and can identify patients with crowded optic nerve heads. It’s also important to tell them if you are taking GLP-1 medications so they can keep a close watch on your eye health.

Emerging research also suggests that improving your heart health might help reduce risks of developing NAION. This includes proper management of high blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol – all conditions that compromise the small blood vessels feeding the optic nerve.

Studies also show patients with heart conditions who better adhere to their medication prescriptions have lower risks of NAION than those who don’t.

Doctors should discuss NAION risks during prescribing decisions and work with eye care providers to monitor regularly for diabetic eye disease. Patients need clear instructions to seek immediate medical attention for sudden vision loss and the need for regular eye examinations.

Aggressive treatment of sleep apnoea and other heart conditions may also help reduce NAION risks. But for now, there remains an ongoing need for more research to understand how GLP-1 medications can affect the eye.

Flora Hui, Research Fellow, Centre for Eye Research Australia and Honorary Fellow, Department of Surgery (Ophthalmology), The University of Melbourne and Pete A Williams, Ulla and Ingemar Dahlberg Professor in Vision Science, Research Group Leader, Karolinska Institutet

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

Every day in Australia, more than 400 people aged over 65 are admitted to hospital due to a fall. That’s around one person every four minutes.

Although anyone can experience a fall, they’re a common cause of disability and loss of independence in older age.

Sadly, 17 older people die as a direct result of falls every day in Australia, often due to head trauma or internal bleeding. Many of these people are dying early, not when their “time has come”.

The good news is that many falls are preventable. Here are five key actions you can take to reduce your risk of falls.

1. Do balance challenging exercises

Recent Australian fall prevention guidelines recommend all people aged 65 years and over, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 50 years and over, should take part in exercise to prevent falls, even if they have never fallen.

In particular, exercise that targets balance and strength is crucial for preventing falls. These are exercises you do while standing, with the feet close together or while standing on one leg (if it’s safe to do so).

These exercises should include controlled movement of the body (such as leaning, reaching and stepping). Examples include heel raises, squats, lunges and stepping in different directions.

To gain the most benefits, fall prevention exercises should be performed at least three times per week.

People who have already had regular falls may benefit from specialised advice from a physiotherapist, exercise physiologist or trained exercise instructor.

2. Have your medications reviewed

Certain medications, such as sleeping tablets, as well as taking multiple medications, can increase your risk of falling.

Older people should discuss and have their medications reviewed each year or after a change in their health, by a GP in collaboration with a pharmacist. Where appropriate, a health-care professional may be able suggest changes which minimise the use of medicines that increase a person’s risk of falling.

3. Maximise the safety of your home

About half of all falls that result in hospital admissions occur in and around the home.

Older people at a higher risk of falls – such as those with significant vision impairment or who have poor mobility – can benefit from a home safety intervention. This would involve:

• an assessment of their home environment
• advice about how to safely undertake daily tasks at home and elsewhere, such as safe mobility on stairs and the use of walking aids where needed
• suggested changes to the home such as installation of grab rails, improved lighting and non-slip mats in the bathroom.

This may be more effective at reducing the risk of falls when provided by an occupational therapist.

Even for older people who have not fallen before, it’s a good idea to reduce clutter, ensure good lighting in the house and remove trip hazards such as electrical cords in walkways.

4. Get your eyes tested regularly

Good vision is essential for maintaining balance, seeing obstacles and moving around safely. Cataracts, a clouding of the lens of the eye, blur your vision and can make you sensitive to light and glare. This common eye condition, associated with age, reduces your ability to spot hazards in the environment.

Research shows having cataracts removed reduces the risk of falls. Fall prevention guidelines recommend a yearly eye check with an optometrist to detect cataracts and other eye conditions.

There’s also evidence wearing bifocal or multifocal glasses can increase the risk of falls by blurring edges close to the feet (such as the edge of a step or gutter). For this reason the Australian fall prevention guidelines recommend active older people use single-lens distance glasses (rather than bifocal, multifocal or progressive lenses) when doing activities outdoors.

It’s also wise for anyone getting a new glasses prescription to be especially careful while they adjust to the new glasses.

5. See a podiatrist if you have painful feet

Healthy and strong feet are important for maintaining good balance and avoiding falls. Research suggests if people with foot problems or painful feet see a podiatrist to have these problems treated, this can reduce their risk of falls.

It’s also important to wear sturdy, well-fitted shoes that have a low, wide heel for greater stability, and a sole with tread to prevent slips.

Don’t wait for a fall to happen before you take action. Every step you take today to reduce your risk of falls is a powerful move toward staying safe and independent.

Anne Tiedemann, Professor of Physical Activity and Health, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney and Cathie Sherrington, Professor, Institute for Musculoskeletal Health, School of Public Health, University of Sydney

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

Our hero is on his way to confront danger, feign love and give away a little of his soul. As he takes a long plane journey over Europe into enemy territory, he reflects on what his younger self would make of him now: “Would he recognise himself beneath the surface of this man who was tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear?”

You would be forgiven for imagining these as the thoughts of Thomas Shelby, screenwriter Steven Knight’s war hero-turned-Peaky Blinders gang leader. Or the meditations of Viggo Mortensen’s Russian mobster with a heart of gold in Knight’s 2007 film, Eastern Promises.

In fact, this is a passage from Ian Fleming’s fifth James Bond novel, From Russia With Love (1957) – a favourite read of another conflicted, powerful man, John F. Kennedy.

Like Bond, Knight’s protagonists are intelligent, charming, witty, courageous, withdrawn and ruthless – scarred by violence with a seam of cold anger. It is this crosscurrent that makes Knight such a strong pick as the scribe for Bond’s next cinematic incarnation, expected to be released in 2028.

If you’ve not read Fleming before, you might be surprised by Bond’s self-reflection and melancholy here – a strand throughout the books which we saw manifest most significantly on screen during Daniel Craig’s tenure. It’s something I am confident Knight will bring to the screen with crackling intensity, and which I have explored in my own Double O trilogy.

As a lifelong Bond fan, it was a dream come true when the Ian Fleming Estate commissioned me to write a trilogy of novels expanding the world of 007. My mission was to introduce new “Double O” agents.

In Double or Nothing (2022), Bond has gone missing and Moneypenny – now chief of the Double O Section, in the world’s most overdue promotion – doesn’t know if he’s been captured or even killed. In the sequel A Spy Like Me (2024), a rogue Johanna Harwood (003) infiltrates the lion’s den to rescue 007. In the final novel, Hurricane Room, out in May 2026, Bond returns as the Double O agents make their last stand.

The Hurricane Room title comes from the same chapter of From Russia With Love, as Bond’s plane experiences turbulence. As “lighting flung its hands across the windows”, Bond draws on the image of the hurricane room:

In the centre of Bond was a hurricane room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics … To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control, and no other possible action could be taken.

I read From Russia With Love aged 12. It was my first Bond novel and I fell in love with this hero whose inner resources keep him from ever giving up. This is also a quality that Knight unpacks beautifully with the dangerous but soulful Tommy Shelby – probably the only gangster to get a Rambert dance treatment (the series has been adapted into a ballet by the British dance company).

Creating icons

An icon is recognisable by eye. We know Bond by a series of images – the tuxedo, the martini, his Walther PPK pistol – just as we know Shelby by his extreme fade, club collar and peak lapels.

But if a character is as flat as a religious icon, they can’t grow or evolve. That’s not the case with Shelby, who we’ve seen grow with Cillian Murphy over a decade, or Bond, who has evolved with us for seven decades and as many actors. Knight can give us a Bond who is both iconic and human.

Another shared strand between Fleming and Knight is the deliberate use of national myth. Fleming set Bond up as a symbol of Britain. When the villains of From Russia With Love want a scandal that will destroy Britain, they look for a symbol: “Of course, most of their strength lies in myth – in the myth of Scotland Yard, of Sherlock Holmes, of the Secret Service… Myths are built on heroic deeds and heroic people. Have they no such men?” And the reply: “There is a man called Bond.”

Fleming then spends the book destroying him. But Bond’s power as a symbol has endured, exemplified in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony as Daniel Craig, using all the magic of the movies, parachuted in with the Queen.

In Peaky Blinders, Knight takes totemic images from our national consciousness, such as the trenches in the first world war, the Houses of Parliament and Birmingham’s industrial past. But he also gives us the wider picture, from working-class veterans with PTSD to Italian, Jewish and Black families, and women struggling for independence. It’s this refreshing look at our identity that promises Knight’s take on Bond as a symbol will be just as fascinating as Fleming’s.

When Fleming first sat down to write Bond, he told a friend: “I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.” He certainly revolutionised the genre, but it wasn’t the end, only the beginning.

It’s been my honour to write in this universe, and I can’t wait to see where Knight takes it next. James Bond Will Return.

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

Kim Sherwood, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Edinburgh

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

Companion cockatoos are renowned for their problem-solving and intriguing characters. It’s no surprise these large, long-lived and intelligent parrots are known to display complex behaviour.

Owners often film their birds dancing to music and post the videos to social media. Snowball, a famous dancing cockatoo, has been shown to have 14 different dance moves.

We wanted to find out more about the dance repertoire of cockatoos and why they might be doing this. In our new research, we examined videos of dance behaviour and played dance music to six cockatoos at an Australian zoo.

These birds weren’t just doing a side step or bobbing up and down. Between them, they had a rich repertoire of at least 30 distinct moves. Some birds coordinated their head bobbing with foot movements, while others undertook body rolls. Our research shows at least 10 of the 21 cockatoo species dance.

If we saw this behaviour in humans, we would draw a clear link between music and dancing and interpret the behaviour as enjoyable. After watching cockatoos voluntarily begin dancing for reasonable lengths of time, it was difficult to reach any conclusion other than cockatoos most likely dance because it’s fun.

How many moves does a cockatoo have?

Dancing is complicated. To dance to music, animals need to be able to learn from others, imitate movements and synchronise their movements. These complex cognitive processes are only known to exist in humans – but evidence is emerging for its presence in chimpanzees and parrots such as cockatoos.

To catalogue the dance moves of cockatoos, we began by studying videos of the behaviour. We analysed 45 dancing videos and recorded all distinct moves.

The five species in these videos were the familiar sulfur-crested cockatoos and little corellas, as well as Indonesian species such as Goffin’s cockatoos, white cockatoos and Moluccan cockatoos.

Across the videos, we spotted 30 movements, including 17 that hadn’t been described scientifically. We also observed 17 other movements, which we classified as “rare” because they were only seen in a single bird.

Head movements were the most common dance move, especially the downward bobbing motion. Half of all videoed cockatoos performed this move.

Dancing – but not to music

Once we catalogued the moves, we then tested whether music could elicit this behaviour in captive cockatoos who weren’t kept as companions.

We undertook a playback experiment with six adult cockatoos at Wagga Wagga Zoo in New South Wales, comprising two sulfur-crested cockatoos, two pink cockatoos and two galahs.

Over three sessions, we played a piece of electronic dance music on repeat for 20 minutes and recorded any responses on video. We repeated our experiment with no music and again with a podcast featuring people talking.

All six cockatoos we studied showed some dancing behaviour at least once over the three sessions. But the rates of dancing weren’t any higher during the playing of music – it was similar to dancing during silence and the podcast.

We don’t fully know why this is. One possibility could be because we played music to existing male-female pairs, and the social environment alone was sufficient to trigger dance behaviour.

Why do cockatoos dance at all?

To find out whether the cockatoo species most prone to dancing were those most closely related, we analysed similarities across species. Goffin’s cockatoos and white cockatoos had the most similar moves, while Goffin’s cockatoo and little corella were the furthest apart.

But this clashed with genetics, as Goffin’s cockatoos are most closely related to little corellas. This suggests dancing behaviour may not be connected to genetic links.

Interestingly, these behaviours are mainly recorded in companion birds. Music playback in the online videos does seem to encourage the bird to keep it going for longer than likely to be seen in zoo or wild birds. These dance moves might represent an adaptation of courtship display movements as a way to connect with their human owners.

Other researchers report being able to trigger dancing behaviour in an African grey parrot and a sulfur-crested cockatoo with music. But the zoo cockatoos in our playback study didn’t respond the same way. This suggests there may be an element of learning to respond to humans.

It’s usually easy to tell if a human behaviour is play or not. But in animals, it can be much more difficult. Researchers define a behaviour as play if it meets four criteria: it occurs while animals are relaxed, it’s begun voluntarily, has no obvious function and appears rewarding. Cockatoo dancing would meet all four of these criteria.

By contrast, repetitive behaviours such as pacing seen in animals kept alone in small cages would not be play – it’s not rewarding and the animals don’t seem relaxed. Parrots kept in poor conditions exhibit self-harming behaviours such as constant screeching and feather pulling.

Captive parrots have complex needs and can experience welfare problems in captivity. Playing music may help enrich their lives.

For cockatoo owners, this suggests that if their birds are dancing, they’re feeling good. And if they’re busting out many different moves in response to music, even better – they might be showing creativity and a willingness to interact.

Acknowledgement: Honours student Natasha Lubke is the lead author of the research on which this article is based.

Raf Freire, Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare, Charles Sturt University

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

Books and bookshelves as interior decoration are a new trend, according to recent reports. An expert at Etsy, where some sell books by the metre in order to fill shelves, reports a 19,616% increase in searches for “book-lover decor” over the past three months, compared with the same time last year. Another “more bespoke service” offers a metre of assorted vintage books, all with orange covers, for £98.

“Bookshelf wealth” is an interior design trend on TikTok, too. According to the Guardian, “A bookshelf that looks like an heirloom family collection, complete with art and ornaments, suggests you care about literature and art – and have time and money to spend on these things.” Even if you don’t read much, you can gesture through your bookshelves to aspirations to culture and good taste.

Like all bright and not-so-bright new ideas, of course, the use of books and bookshelves as interior decoration has a much older history than its recent online incarnation suggests. Bookshelves as interior decoration – along with book-of-the-month clubs and discussion of books in popular media – were 19th and 20th-century trends too, though with important differences.

Unlike books bought by the metre, those trends could cultivate a genuine interest in reading – as do some 2025 trends, like the celebrity book club. Helen Garner’s This House of Grief was recently chosen by musician Dua Lipa for hers.

Democratising reading

The imposing library in the gentleman’s stately house in the 19th century is a familiar image. It was a key element in marking one’s arrival in the privileged professional or landed classes.

At the end of the 19th century, though, book publishing (and book talk) filtered down to middle-class and working-class readers who began to self-educate or to broaden their reading through accessing new books. These changes were brought about by wider education and employment, but also an increase in publishing activity, especially for new novels. (The later invention of the mass-market paperback, in the 1930s, would be another landmark.) Readers hunted down the classics, followed reading lists set up by reformist associations, or joined newly opened libraries, which also expanded across this period.

A new fashion emerged, from the 1920s, for knowing the best, most absorbing or enjoyable of the many new books appearing: modern novels above all. This fashion for the new often existed alongside a desire to know the classics and their authors – and to display them all in the home.

Book clubs formed, book programs on the new medium of radio were introduced, and new essays and advertisements about owning and displaying books appeared. Features in newspapers and magazines highlighting the “Book of the Week” or “Book of the Month” became common by the late 1920s. So did essays and advertisements addressed primarily to women readers. Most images, though, showed a man sitting in an armchair surrounded by his homely books.

A new language emerged too, describing the emerging book worlds as “middlebrow”, in contrast to the “lowbrow” (those merely following popular or mass tastes) and the highbrow (those whose tastes were only high, refined and, perhaps, pretentious). All three terms could be terms of abuse: usually in feminised forms.

Harvard Classics

The volume of new books could provoke anxieties for both established critics and the new readers about “drowning in a sea of new novels”, alongside new enthusiasms for trying to keep up with the latest. Guidance in reading – what to read and how to read – became a new industry. So did guidance on buying and collecting books, and owning them. And, no less important, to displaying them by building a library in your own home.

In the United States, in 1909–10, Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University, edited the Harvard Classics, or Dr Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf: 50 volumes containing selections of classic works, newly packaged for ordinary and aspiring readers.

Authors ranged from Plato to Saint Augustine, Dante to Milton, and included Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Subjects ranged from Christian texts, to texts from Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. The total choices were extraordinary (and no doubt daunting for many). Special editions were produced, but cheaper versions appeared over the 1920s and 1930s.

Harvard Classics were designed for the home. They could be purchased with a five-foot bookshelf to hold them, as well as a booklet giving plans for reading through the collection in just 15 minutes a day. The mix of high culture and easy access to it was one dimension of what would be labelled the middlebrow. The Harvard Classics were available to Australian readers by the 1940s.

Early book clubs

The American Book-Of-The-Month Club, launched in 1926, was another outstanding success in attracting a new generation of readers. Henry Handel Richardson’s Ultima Thule and Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land, in their US editions, were among the club’s successful monthly choices.

In Australia, All About Books, launched in 1928, was produced not by a literary critic, but by a key figure in the book trade, bookseller and editor D.W. Thorpe. Its aim was to “sift the grains of wheat out of so much chaff” – sort out the good books from the so many new books. Its readers were “ordinary readers”, not part of the literary community but eager readers, whether in business or the home, keen to know the best of the latest books.

It presented recommendations of the best new books (and the rest), plus guides to what was being read in England and the US. All About Books printed short notices, plus slightly longer reviews by noted critics George Cowling and Nettie Palmer on new fiction. Palmer’s column was “A Reader’s Notebook”, while Cowling’s became “All Sorts of Reading for Everybody”.

New habits of reading were also linked to new habits of book buying and book owning. The building of a personal library might begin by purchasing the ten-book Masterpiece Library of Short Stories (each book contained two volumes) from the 1920s, or by discerning consumption – a most important quality to achieve – of the new books appearing.

With such abundance, guidance in how to build a personal or “domestic” library was always needed. All About Books obliged.

Australian home libraries

The home became the crucial site for this new book culture, and the frequent recommendation that books and bookshelves made attractive living-room furniture was not simply trivial. These should be good books in good bookshelves, well presented in the domestic space.

The new book culture was very reader-oriented and often feminised. A weekly book page appeared in the commercial radio paper, The Listener-In, edited and written by Miss J.G. Swain, who also presented a weekly radio program: Living Authors. A Book of the Week selection appeared on the Women’s Page, and readers were invited into close relations with “living authors”.

As leading historian of Australian reading, Patrick Buckridge, has shown, the very successful Australian Women’s Weekly also ran extended pages on good books and good reading from the 1930s to the 1960s. Women readers were specifically addressed, and they were the key participants.

A worried stenographer wrote to the Weekly, with perfect middlebrow judgement:

I like biographies, best-sellers, history and travel books and most of the classics, but the girls I have come in contact with cannot be bothered with any of these, and, if they read at all, just read light fiction. (20 July 1940)

In Buckridge’s words:

Good books and good reading [were] defined mainly by negation […] they are what “light fiction” is not. […] Good books could also be defined […] as the books that should be owned and kept in the home.

This mid-century period in Australia has often been characterised as a period of cultural lack, before the post-war developments in modern literature and art. But looking back now through the vision of reading and publishing history – and the broad range of cultural institutions – we see something else.

We see a period of cultural expansion and diversity: of new books, new readers, new cultural and commercial opportunities.

Much of this culture around books and reading continued in the post-war decades, in newspaper review pages for example, but criticism was increasingly in the hands of university and other professional critics. The broad public culture around books was divided and much was lost – until its reinvention with the expansion of book festivals, reading groups, and new forms of reading fandom in recent decades

‘At home with books’

Books for the home, for the domestic reader, for owning and displaying in home bookshelves, were no doubt involved in forms of social distinction and class affirmation. To be “at home with books” was a demonstrable level of cultural capital.

But the spread of books and reading also involved forms of democratisation and new kinds of engagement with modern culture. That many of the ideas and the books themselves came from overseas was not a matter of “domination”, but of wanting to keep up with modern culture as it appeared — much as we do today.

In interesting ways, the last two decades have seen something like a resurgence in middlebrow (and “high pop”) cultural enthusiasms. The word “middlebrow” itself has had something of a revival.

Bookshelves as interior decoration are likely to be with us – in ever more complicated and design friendly forms – for quite a long while yet. Bookshelves still have many new and many old stories to tell.

Most importantly today, the popularity and public presence of a wide range of reading activity – right across the scale of genres, from literary to popular – has significant potential to further democratise reading.

David Carter, Professor Emeritus, Australian Literature, The University of Queensland

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

Dame Stella Rimington, former director general of the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5, and author of several spy thrillers, has died this week, aged 90.

A decade ago, Rimington came to Melbourne to promote her latest spy thriller, featuring her alter ego Liz Carlyle, also an MI5 agent. I was invited, as convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia, to interview her before an appreciative audience at Readings bookshop in Hawthorn. They were clearly delighted to be hearing from a real-life spy – especially one widely credited as the blueprint for Judi Dench’s version of M in the Bond movies.

Tall, elegant, impeccably dressed and sharp as a stiletto, Dame Stella was everything we wanted her to be: a woman who had made it to the top in the macho world of espionage.

Her literary legacy includes a 2001 autobiography, Open Secret, (widely seen as disappointing) and several spy thrillers, which gained a dedicated following. Her 2004 debut thriller, At Risk, was praised in the Guardian as “a cracking good thriller” with “nitty-gritty insider detail”. Together, her books provide a fascinating insight into a clandestine world more usually presented from what she herself described as a masculine point of view.

“When you think about it, all fictional spies are blokes, and spy writers when I started were chaps too,” she told the Edinburgh International Book Festival of her Liz Carlyle novels in 2015. “So I was certain that my character was going to be female. I wanted her to reflect accurately what a female does in my former service.”

Both of her female protagonists, Carlyle and CIA agent Manon Tyler (in her final two novels), reflected aspects of her own personality. Their adventures, blended with the challenges of ordinary life – relationships, workplace politics, insecurities – took readers around the world as they dealt with “fictional” threats to the nation.

An accidental spy

Sir Richard Moore, head of MI6, the foreign intelligence branch of the UK secret service, has called Rimington a “true trailblazer”. MI5 itself states it “underwent far-reaching transformation under Dame Stella’s leadership”, reports the BBC.

But she never set out to be a spy. Born in South London in 1935, she went to Edinburgh University in 1954, where she earned a master’s degree in English and literature – which shows where a good humanities degree can get you. After training as an archivist, she married John Rimington, who she accompanied to India when he took up a position at the High Commission in New Delhi.

After two years of tea parties and amateur dramatics, Rimington was asked to help out with some office work for one of the First Secretaries, who just happened to be working for MI5. As she later explained, she was subsequently “tapped on the shoulder”. Eventually, she would climb from the “typing pool to the top”.

Her elevation was never going to be easy in the hard-drinking, masculine culture of the 1970s secret service, when women were paid much less than their male counterparts. Describing herself and her female colleagues as “restive”, Rimington admitted it took something of a rebellion in the ranks before women were recognised as equals, culminating in her appointment as the first female director of MI5 in 1992.

She was also the first head of MI5 to be publicly identified, before retiring in 1996. Her family were forced to flee their London house to escape the tabloids, which published headlines like “Housewife super spy”. She later said it was the point where she “felt most unsafe”. She was, however, broadly in favour of greater public openness about the UK’s intelligence services.

Given the presumed end of the Cold War, the major threats Rimington had to deal with were largely those of domestic terrorism: threats she was required to report to then prime minister John Major. Apparently, there was often very little information to go on, at which point Major would respond “Oh well, Stella, do your best”, which she invariably did.

Booker judging and a publishing uproar

After her retirement, Rimington maintained an active public life, joining the boards of such venerable British institutions as Marks and Spencer.

In 2011, she served as chair of the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize. This created something of a stir, when the judges espoused “readability” and the ability to “zip along” as criteria they would use to assess the prize. This did not go down well – and some critics called the subsequent shortlist “was the worst in decades”.

Defending the judges’ decision at the awards ceremony, Rimington had the temerity to compare the publishing world to the KGB, thanks to its use of “black propaganda, destabilisation operations, plots and double agents”. Sounds like a great idea for a crime novel – of which she wrote a few.

Her autobiography and novels had to be submitted to MI5 for vetting and clearance. She was occasionally asked to change names and places.

Asked to write a new introduction to an anthology of stories edited by Hugh and Graham Greene, The Spy’s Bedtime Book, Rimington suggested the spy novel is “in a special class of literature in which the real and the imaginary can be mixed in any proportion, so long as they both are present”. Arguably, this is true of all literature.

The world is still dangerous

As Rimington informed the audience at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in 2012, the world is still a dangerous place. Then, she pointed to the continuing rise of domestic terrorism, instability in the Middle East and Putin’s ongoing aggression towards the West. How right she has proved to be – which is hardly any consolation.

“There’s so much to discover in spy stories,” she once said. “It’s a small ‘lifting of the curtains’ of a world that people know exists but don’t know much about.”

Rimington was an exceptional woman whose books document the challenging times she lived through, from an insider’s unique perspective on the front line. The line between the reality of Stella Rimington and the fiction she created may be hard to draw – which makes them fascinating reading.

Sue Turnbull, Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong

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

Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, released 50 years ago, is remembered for its eerie atmosphere and mysterious story. But beneath its haunting beauty, the film challenges the idea of colonial control over the Australian landscape.

The rock becomes a place that refuses to be explained or conquered by European logic.

This tension between the land and colonial power still matters today. The failure of the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament shows how divided Australia remains over questions of reconciliation and Indigenous sovereignty.

Rewatching Picnic at Hanging Rock in 2025, we can appreciate the film as an unsettling portrayal of place, silence and disappearance.

Unease and ambiguity

Picnic at Hanging Rock tells the story of a group of private schoolgirls and their teachers who visit the nearby Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day in 1900. During the excursion, three students and one teacher mysteriously disappear.

No clear explanation is ever given, which unsettles both the characters and the audience. The mystery triggers hysteria, scandal and a slow collapse of order at Appleyard College.

As the search for answers continues, the film refuses to provide resolution, deepening its sense of unease and ambiguity.

Based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, the story captured the public imagination with its haunting beauty and unanswered mystery. Audiences were obsessed with whether it was based on true events (it wasn’t).

The film became a landmark of the Australian New Wave, a 1970s movement that revitalised the national film industry with bold, artistic storytelling and a focus on uniquely Australian themes.

With its poetic visuals, haunting score and colonial setting, the film stood out for its mood rather than action. Audiences were both fascinated and frustrated by its lack of closure, and it gained a cult following, especially among viewers drawn to its gothic atmosphere and slow-burning mystery.

The mystery of the landscape

Ngannelong, also known as Hanging Rock, is a striking volcanic formation north-west of Melbourne. For the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung peoples of the Kulin Nation it is a deeply important cultural and spiritual place.

Lindsay and Weir’s mystery of white schoolgirls who mysteriously vanish sits on top of older, deeper traumas – those of dispossession and the forced removal of Indigenous people from their lands.

While the film appears dreamlike and mystical, Ngannelong’s sacredness challenges this romantic view, reminding us that the land holds its own stories and history.

It does not forget.

Picnic at Hanging Rock can be seen as a powerful story about colonial fear and uncertainty. The unexplained disappearance of the schoolgirls plays off the idea that European thinking and logic can’t fully understand or master the Australian landscape.

When watched through this lens the story reveals just how fragile colonialism is. The film invites viewers to think differently about Australia’s identity, suggesting the landscape itself remembers the past and actively resists the stories colonisers have tried to tell about it.

Fragile powers

The film contrasts the tidy world of Appleyard College – which stands for colonial order, built on white privilege and Britishness – against the untamed mysterious landscape of Ngannelong.

The girls represent white femininity, meant to bring culture and control. When they vanish, it’s as if the land rejects these colonial ideals.

Their disappearance unravels the school’s order, exposing how fragile colonial power really is. It hints at a deeper crisis beneath the surface.

Russell Boyd’s cinematography is key to the film’s unsettling mood. Shifting light and strange angles create a sense of uncertainty. The bush isn’t just background, it is defiant. This fits with “ecological cinema”, where nature has its own voice.

In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the land often overpowers people. It refuses to be controlled or explained by colonial ideas.

Historical wounds

Picnic at Hanging Rock is part of the Australian Gothic: literature and films which explore dark parts of Australia’s story. Named for European Gothic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, these 20th century Australian stories often express the anxieties, violences and uncanny dislocations of colonisation and the natural landscape these settlers encountered.

In this Australian Gothic tradition, Picnic at Hanging Rock uses haunting and mystery to explore deep social and historical wounds. These unsettled feelings still shape how Australia sees itself.

Australia’s national identity rests on silences and erasures. Like the missing schoolgirls, the colonial subject is lost – unsure of who belongs and whose history matters.

Picnic at Hanging Rock remains powerful today, especially in light of ongoing discussions about Indigenous sovereignty and reconciliation in Australia. The film’s mystery is never solved, forcing viewers to sit with the discomfort of what’s left unsaid.

The land is not something empty or passive, but alive. It is a force that remembers and resists.

Even 50 years later, the film still unsettles, not just through its eerie beauty, but by challenging colonial ways of thinking and reminding us that sovereignty endures – even if it’s not always visible.

Jo Coghlan, Associate Professor, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of New England

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

Stone tools dating to at least 1.04 million years ago have been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. This means early hominins made a major sea crossing from the Asian mainland much earlier than previously thought – and they likely didn’t have any boats.

This discovery, made by a team of Indonesian archaeologists working in collaboration with Australian researchers, is published today in Nature.

It adds to our understanding of how extinct humans once moved across the Wallace Line – an imaginary boundary that runs through the Lombok Strait in the Indonesian archipelago.

Beyond this line, unique and often peculiar animal species – including hominins – evolved in isolation.

Hominins in Wallacea

The oceanic island zone between the Asian and Australian landmasses is known as Wallacea.

Previously, archaeologists have found hominins lived here from at least 1.02 million years ago, thanks to discoveries of stone tools at Wolo Sege on the island of Flores. Meanwhile, tools dated to around 194,000 years ago have been found at Talepu on Sulawesi.

The human evolutionary story in the islands east of the Asian landmass is strange.

The ancient human species that used to live on the island of Flores were small in stature. We know this thanks to the fossils of Homo floresiensis (popularly known as “hobbits”), as well as the 700,000-year-old fossils of a similar small-bodied hominin.

These discoveries suggest it could have been the extinct Asian hominin Homo erectus that breached the formidable marine barrier between this small Wallacean island and mainland Southeast Asia. Over hundreds of thousands of years, their body size reduced in what’s known as island dwarfism.

To the north of Wallacea, the island of Luzon in the Philippines has also yielded evidence of hominins from around 700,000 years ago. Just recently, fossils of a previously unknown diminutive hominin species, Homo luzonensis, were found here.

So how and when did ancient human species cross the Wallace Line?

The Sulawesi stone tools

Our new study reveals the first evidence a sea crossing to Sulawesi may have happened at least 1 million years ago. That’s much earlier than previously known, and means humans reached here at about the same time as Flores, if not earlier.

A field team led by senior archaeologist Budianto Hakim from the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia (BRIN), excavated a total of seven stone artefacts from the sedimentary layers of a sandstone outcrop in a modern corn field at Calio in southern Sulawesi.

In the Early Pleistocene, there was a river channel nearby. This would have been the site of hominin tool-making and other activities such as hunting.

The Calio artefacts consist of small, sharp-edged fragments of stones (flakes) that the early human tool-makers struck from larger pebbles they most likely found in nearby riverbeds.

To produce these flakes, the hominins hit the edge of one stone with another in a controlled manner. This would fracture the first stone in a predictable way.

This tool-making activity left telltale marks on the stones that can be clearly distinguished from naturally broken rocks. So we can say unequivocally that hominins were living in this landscape, making stone tools, at the time the ancient river sediments that comprise the sandstone rock were accumulating.

And that was a very long time ago. Indeed, the team confirmed an age of at least 1.04 million years for the stone artefacts based on paleomagnetic dating of the sandstone itself, along with direct dating of a pig fossil found alongside the artefacts.

Who were these hominins and how did they get to Sulawesi?

As noted earlier, previous research has shown that archaic, stone tool-making hominins managed to get across from the Asian continental landmass to colonise at least some islands in Wallacea.

The discovery of the extremely old stone tools at Calio is another significant new piece of the puzzle. This site has yet to yield any hominin fossils, however. So while we now know there were tool-makers on Sulawesi 1 million years ago, their identity remains a mystery.

Indeed, there are many fascinating questions that remain unanswered, including how these hominins were able to cross the Wallace Line in the first place.

When sea levels were at their lowest, the shortest possible distance between Sulawesi and the nearest part of the adjacent Asian landmass would have been about 50 kilometres.

This is too far to swim, especially since the ocean currents are far too strong. It’s also unlikely these archaic hominins had the cognitive ability to develop watercraft capable of making sea voyages. Setting sail over the horizon to an unseen land would have required advanced planning to gather resources – something they probably weren’t capable of.

Most likely, then, they crossed to Sulawesi from the Asian mainland in the same way rodents and monkeys are suspected to have done – by accident. Perhaps they were castaways on natural “rafts” of floating vegetation.

Our discovery also leads us to wonder what might have happened to Homo erectus on the world’s 11th largest island. Sulawesi is more than 12 times the size of Flores, and much closer to the adjacent Asian mainland.

In fact, Sulawesi is a bit like a mini-continent in itself, which sets it apart from other Wallacean islands. If hominins were cut off in the ecologically rich habitats of this enormous island for a million years, would they have undergone the same evolutionary changes as the Flores hobbits? Or might something completely different have happened?

To unravel this fascinating story, we will continue to search the islands of Wallacea – especially those close to the Asian mainland – for ancient artefacts, fossils and other clues.

Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Basran Burhan, PhD Candidate, Archaeology, Griffith University; Gerrit (Gert) van den Bergh, Researcher in Palaeontology, University of Wollongong; Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University, and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor in Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University

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

The “100 kettlebell swings a day” challenge is the latest viral fitness endeavour on social media. The challenge is simple: pick up a kettlebell and do 100 swings (bringing the kettlebell from between your legs and using your core and glutes to swing it up to chest or shoulder height) every day. These can be done either in one stint, or broken up throughout the day.

Proponents of the challenge say it leads to fat loss, improved muscle mass and a stronger posterior chain (glutes, back and hamstrings) – all in a short daily session.

At first glance, it sounds like a time-efficient, no-fuss approach to getting fitter with minimal equipment. But while there’s some merit in consistency, this type of challenge often ignores fundamental principles of exercise and training – and could even do more harm than good.

Here’s a few reasons why it might be best to skip the kettlebell challenge – and what you can try instead.

1. It’s not personalised to you

One of the biggest flaws in the 100 kettlebell swings challenge is that it treats everyone the same, regardless of experience level, injury history, mobility or training goals. What’s manageable for an advanced athlete could cause problems for a beginner with poor hip mobility or lower back issues.

Daily, high-rep dynamic movements which use explosive power, such as kettlebell swings, require good technique, good posture and body awareness. Without that, you’re simply reinforcing poor movement patterns. Worse, you could be inviting injury when such movements are done repeatedly.

Effective training should be personalised – or at least adapted to your movement abilities and fitness requirements in order to have the most impact.

2. No room for progress

The human body adapts quickly. If you do the same 100 reps with the same amount of weight every single day, the challenge becomes less effective over time. That initial burn you felt in week one? It’ll be gone by week three.

In well-designed training programmes, there’s a principle called “progressive overload”. This involves gradually increasing stress on the body, either through the amount of weight you’re lifting, the number of repetitions you do of an exercise, the number of sets you complete or the complexity of your movements.

The 100-swing challenge skips this entirely. This means you’ll probably hit a plateau fairly quickly.

3. Risk of injury

Doing 100 swings every day, especially without rest or proper technique, can lead to injuries such as muscle strains or joint pain in the back and shoulders.

Too much repetitive movement, insufficient recovery time and inexperience can also lead to an increased risk of an overuse injury – a condition caused by repeated stress on muscles, joints or tissues. This often results in pain, swelling, or stiffness and could potentially mean taking weeks or even months off from working out to fully recover.

Picking up this challenge might be appealing but it also ticks a lot of boxes for overuse injury.

4. It undermines recovery

Recovery between workouts is not optional. In fact, it’s where the actual adaptation happens. Training breaks the body down, while recovery builds it back stronger.

Kettlebell swings, especially if performed explosively and with heavier loads, place stress on your central nervous system. Doing them every single day without rest days, mobility work (such as stretching) or variation can lead to chronic fatigue, poor sleep, nagging injuries and even reduced performance in other areas of training.

If you’ve started the challenge and find you’re constantly sore, tight or worn down, the challenge may be doing more harm than good.

5. It’s a one-dimensional solution

Fitness isn’t just about repetition. True strength and conditioning involves a variety of movements, such as pushing, pulling, squatting, rotating and stabilising.

The 100-swing challenge trains only one plane of motion and one movement pattern. While that’s better than nothing, it’s nowhere near comprehensive. Moreover, doing the same task over and over can become mindless. You’re not necessarily getting stronger or fitter – you’re just going through the motions.

A smarter way to use kettlebells

In fairness, the challenge does have some value in the right context. For beginners who need structure, it can help establish a daily habit. It requires minimal equipment, little space and can raise heart rate, build endurance and activate the posterior chain.

But for it to be sustainable and effective, a few things must be in place:

• Your form must be solid
• The kettlebell weight must be appropriate for your fitness level
• You should vary the volume or intensity over time
• You should include rest days
• It should be part of a broader training plan – not your only form of training

If you enjoy kettlebell swings, there are more intelligent and safer ways to include them in your training than doing 100 reps every day.

Try incorporating swings into interval sessions, circuits or strength workouts with varied repetitions and loads. Instead of doing 100 swings alone, aim for 100 total reps using a mix of exercises, such as goblet squats, rows and presses. This approach not only keeps things more balanced, but also reduces the risk of injury from overuse and gives different muscle groups time to recover .

The “100 kettlebell swings a day” challenge might sound appealing in its simplicity, but simple doesn’t always mean smart. Without personalisation, progression and recovery, it can quickly turn into a repetitive grind that risks doing more harm than good.

Yes, training should be challenging, but it should also be strategic. Your body deserves more than just a checkbox of daily repetitions – it needs the right moves done the right way.

Jen Wilson, Senior Exercise and Health Practitioner, Nottingham Trent University and Athalie Redwood-Brown, Senior Lecturer in Performance Analysis of Sport, Nottingham Trent University

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

Climate modelling is spoken about often by climate scientists. These complex, computer-generated calculations enable scientists to make predictions about the climate of the future.

Information generated from climate models is often shared through graphs, maps, images, animations or reports. These visual formats are excellent for accurately communicating data, statistics and recommendations, but can feel inaccessible for non-expert members of the general public.

David Attenborough said “saving our planet is now a communications challenge”. This points to the gap between the knowledge about the actions needed to address climate change, and motivation towards taking this action.

In this gap, musical creativity and imagination can offer new pathways towards awareness and understanding. This can contribute to how we collectively develop climate communication.

I have been collaborating with a team of artists and scientists on Dark Oceanography to explore new ways of sharing climate information.

Beyond words

The intangible nature of music provides exceptional opportunities to convey things that words, numbers or images cannot.

Music is a form of knowledge that is experienced, as it is felt through the body by the listener. Music provides a different means of engagement to inform our understanding of environmental phenomena – and therefore how we understand climate issues.

Climate models move beyond how things are or have been. They predict how things might be, and offer a window to view the future. Dark Oceanography takes modelling into new territory.

As director and a performer of Dark Oceanography, I worked with composer Kate Milligan, music technologist Aaron Wyatt, oceanographer Navid Constantinou and a team of percussionists.

Stepping beyond prediction into imagination, Dark Oceanography questions the nature of data and how it can be communicated. By integrating data of ocean eddies with experimental music and spatial audio technology, this work creates a fictional climate model to be experienced through new music.

Translating eddies

Ocean eddies are circular water movements like big whirlpools, found throughout the ocean. Although they can be up to 200 kilometres in diameter and descend deep beneath the ocean surface, they are unseen from land.

Eddies propel heat, energy and nutrients through the ocean. They play a key role in the circulation of water and heat in the ocean. Research shows the behaviour of eddies is changing and becoming more active. However, eddies are not always included in climate projections.

Dark Oceanography invites the audience to experience the vitality of these ocean systems, translating and transforming eddy datasets into music.

The live performances of three percussionists are captured by close microphones and sent swirling around the performance space through a multi-channel spatial audio system. Seated in the round and ringed by stations of percussion instruments, the audience is submerged in the circular motion of 360-degree sound.

The audience experience is like listening to an eddy from the inside.

The integration of scientific data with creative practice offers more than just innovative communication methods for science. It also offers new possibilities for musical composition and performance.

In Dark Oceanography, the circular motion of ocean eddies permeates every aspect of the work. This includes the instrument selection, the performers’ gestures and techniques, the notation and audience seating.

The continuous circular motion of eddies offers a metaphor for restarting, for renewal. Each iteration brings a level of change and evolution. The piece descends through the dataset in three stages from the ocean’s surface to nearly one kilometre underwater. The percussionists begin by sounding delicate glass and metal instruments, before the soundworld deepens with low drums and the sinking, sliding sounds of timpani.

A changing feat

The dataset that propels the music was extrapolated from existing ocean simulations, following the pathways of eddies from the Eastern Australian Current. As performance locations for this work change, so will the data, integrating new eddies drawn from local ocean currents. The musical experience also changes with different eddies.

The impact of changing ocean eddy systems on the global climate is currently unknown. This confluence of sound and science leans into the unknown, and offers a way of navigating uncertainty through music. Dark Oceanography shows us that there are many ways to imagine the future.

This article is part of Making Art Work, our series on what inspires artists and the process of their work.

Louise Devenish, Senior Lecturer and director of The Sound Collectors Lab, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, Monash University

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

When your favourite dress or shirt shrinks in the wash, it can be devastating, especially if you followed the instructions closely. Unfortunately, some fabrics just seem to be more prone to shrinking than others – but why?

Understanding more about the science of textile fibres can not only help you prevent the shrinkage of clothing, but also might help you “rescue” the occasional garment after a laundry accident.

It’s all down to the fibres

To know more about clothing shrinkage, we first need to understand a little about how textiles are made.

Common textile fibres, such as cotton and linen, are made from plants. These fibres are irregular and crinkled in their natural form. If you zoom deeper inside them, you’ll see millions of tiny, long-chain cellulose molecules that naturally exist in coiled or convoluted shapes.

During textile manufacturing, these fibres are mechanically pulled, stretched and twisted to straighten and align these cellulose chains together. This creates smooth, long threads.

On a chemical level, there are also links between the chains called hydrogen bonds. These strengthen the fibre and the thread and make it more cohesive.

Threads are woven or knitted into fabrics, which locks in the tension that holds those fibres side by side.

However, these fibres have good “memory”. Whenever they’re exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical action (such as agitation in your washing machine), they tend to relax and return to their original crinkled state.

This fibre memory is why some fabrics wrinkle so easily and why some of them may even shrink after washing.

How does washing shrink the fabric?

To understand shrinkage, we again need to zoom down to the molecular level. During laundering, hot water helps to increase the energy level of fibres – this means they shake more rapidly which disrupts the hydrogen bonds holding them in place.

The way a fabric is knitted or woven also plays a role. Loosely knitted fabrics have more open spaces and loops, making them more susceptible to shrinkage. Tightly woven fabrics are more resistant because the threads are locked into place with less room to move.

Additionally, cellulose is hydrophilic – it attracts water. Water molecules penetrate inside the fibres, causing swelling and making them more flexible and mobile. Adding to all this is the tumble and twist action inside the washing machine.

The whole process makes the fibres relax and recoil back to their natural, less stretched, crinkled state. As a result, the garment shrinks.

It’s not just hot water – here’s why

This doesn’t just happen with hot water, as you may have experienced yourself with clothes made of rayon, for example.

Cold water can still penetrate into fibres, making them swell, along with the mechanical action of the tumbling in the washing machine. The effect is less dramatic with cold water, but it can happen.

To minimise shrinkage, you may use cold water, the lowest spin speed or the gentlest cycle available, especially for cotton and rayon. Machine labels don’t always fully explain the impact of spin speed and agitation. When in doubt, choose a “delicate” setting.

What about wool?

Different fibres shrink in different ways; there is no single mechanism that fits all.

While cellulose-based fabrics shrink as described above, wool is an animal-derived fibre made of keratin proteins. Its surface is covered in tiny, overlapping scales called cuticle cells.

During washing, these cuticles open up and interlock with neighbouring fibres causing fibre entanglement or “felting”. This makes the clothing feel denser and smaller – in other words, it shrinks.

Why don’t synthetics shrink as much?

Synthetic fibres such as polyester or nylon are made from petroleum-based polymers, engineered for stability and durability.

These polymers contain more crystalline regions that are highly ordered and act as an internal “skeleton”, preventing the fibres from crinkling.

Textile scientists and engineers are also working on fabrics that resist shrinkage through advanced material design. Among promising innovations are blended yarns that combine natural and synthetic fibres.

Some researchers are working on shape-memory polymers that can change shape – or return to a previous shape – in response to temperature or water, for example. This is different to stretch fabrics (such as those used in activewear) that are made up of highly elastic fibres which “bounce back” to their original state after stretching.

How can I unshrink a piece of clothing?

If a favourite garment has shrunk in the wash, you can try to rescue it with this simple method.

Gently soak the item in lukewarm water mixed with hair conditioner or baby shampoo (approximately one tablespoon per litre). Then, carefully stretch the fabric back into shape and dry it flat or under gentle tension – for example, by pegging the garment to a drying rack.

The reason this works is because conditioners have chemicals known as cationic surfactants. These will temporarily lubricate the fibres, making them more flexible and allowing you to gently pull everything back into place.

This process can’t completely reverse extreme shrinkage but it can help recover some of the lost size, making the clothes wearable again.

Nisa Salim, Director, Swinburne-CSIRO National Testlab for Composite Additive Manufacturing, Swinburne University of Technology

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

We wash our hands, sanitise shopping trolleys and wipe down cafe tables. But what about our phones? We touch these devices dozens of times a day, and take them everywhere from the kitchen to the dining table, and even the bathroom.

Phones can be contaminated with many kinds of potential germs. When was the last time you wiped down yours – and with what?

If you use the wrong cleaning agents or tools, you could strip your phone’s protective coatings, degrade waterproof seals, or even affect its touch sensitivity.

Do phones really need cleaning?

Touchscreens get covered in fingerprints and smudges, so there are aesthetic and functional reasons to wipe down your screen.

Another reason comes down to potential health concerns. Whenever mobile phones are swabbed for microorganisms, scientists inevitably find hundreds of species of bacteria and viruses.

While not all of these cause sickness, the potential for transmission is there. We use phones while in the bathroom and then put them near our mouths, touch them while eating, and pass them between people in meetings, cafes, parties and classrooms.

Unlike hands, which can be washed many times a day, phones are rarely cleaned properly – if at all.

If you do want to sanitise your phone, it’s also important to not damage it in the process.

Some cleaning products will damage your phone

You might think a quick swipe with a household cleaner or hand sanitiser is a clever shortcut to keeping your phone clean. However, many of these products can actually degrade your device’s surface and internal components over time.

For example, both Apple and Samsung advise against using bleach, hydrogen peroxide, vinegar, aerosol sprays, window cleaners or high-concentration alcohol wipes (above 70%) on their devices.

Most smartphones are coated with an oleophobic layer – a thin film that helps resist fingerprints and smudges. Harsh chemicals such as alcohols, acetone or ammonia-based cleaners can strip this coating, making your screen more vulnerable to smudging, and diminished touch responsiveness.

Vinegar, a common DIY disinfectant, can corrode aluminium or plastic edges due to its high acidity. Bleach and hydrogen peroxide, though highly effective as disinfectants, are also too aggressive for the delicate materials used in consumer electronics.

High-alcohol content wipes may dry out plastics and make them brittle with repeated use.

In short: if the cleaner is tough enough to disinfect your kitchen bench, it is probably too harsh for your phone.

How should I clean my phone then?

The good news is that cleaning your phone properly is simple and inexpensive. You just need to follow the guidelines backed by major manufacturers. You should also unplug and remove any protective cases or accessories when cleaning your phone.

Most tech companies recommend using 70% isopropyl alcohol wipes (not higher), soft microfibre cloths, and anti-static soft-bristled brushes made of nylon, horsehair or goat hair to clean delicate areas like speaker grills and charging ports.

During the COVID pandemic, Apple revised its cleaning guidelines to permit the use of Clorox disinfecting wipes and 70% isopropyl alcohol on iPhones, provided they are used gently to avoid damaging screen coatings or allowing moisture to seep into the device.

Samsung offers similar advice, recommending users wipe down their phones with a microfibre cloth lightly dampened with a 70% alcohol solution, while steering clear of direct application to ports and openings.

Prevent accidental damage when using these tips

Never spray liquid directly onto the phone, as moisture can seep into ports and internal components, leading to short circuits or corrosion.

Submerging your phone in any cleaning solution is also risky, even for water-resistant models: the seals that prevent water from getting in, such as rubber gaskets, adhesives, nano-coatings and silicone layers, can degrade over time.

Avoid using paper towels, tissues, or rough cloths which may leave scratches on the screen or shed lint that clogs openings.

Finally, be cautious about over-cleaning. Excessive wiping or scrubbing can wear down protective coatings, making your phone more susceptible to fingerprints, smudges, and long-term surface damage.

How often should I clean my phone?

While there is no strict rule for how often you should clean your phone, giving it a proper wipe-down at least once a week under normal use would make sense.

If you regularly take your phone into high-risk environments such as public transport, hospitals, gyms, or bathrooms it is wise to clean it more frequently.

If you’re serious about hygiene, cleaning not just your hands but one of the things you touch most every single day makes sense.

Doing it wrong can slowly damage your device. But doing it right is simple, affordable, and doesn’t take much time.

Meena Jha, Head Technology and Pedagogy Cluster CML-NET, CQUniversity Australia

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

Humans may be living longer on average these days, but, even so, only a fraction of us will live to see our 100th birthday. Yet the reasons why only a select few will become centenarians still remains a mystery to scientists.

But the latest work published by myself and my colleagues has just uncovered one factor that may be key to the long lives that centenarians experience. My research team has found that people that live to 100 seem to possess the superhuman ability to avoid disease.

Centenarians are of such great interest to scientists because they may hold the key to understanding how we can live longer — and live longer in better health. Some questions researchers have long pondered is whether one of the keys to a centenarian’s resilience mainly lies in their ability to postpone major diseases, or whether they’re simply better at surviving them. Or, could it be that they avoid certain diseases altogether?

Understanding the answer to these questions would bring us at least one step closer to figuring out what specific factors contribute to longevity. So my colleagues and I set out to see if we could find the answers. In two recent studies, we analysed and compared long and shorter-lived people born in the same year.

The results from the two studies showed that centenarians not only suffer from fewer diseases overall throughout their lives, they also develop them more slowly. They’re also less likely to experience deadly conditions, such as major cardiovascular disease, compared to their shorter-lived peers.

The first study included 170,787 people born in Stockholm County, Sweden between 1912 and 1922. Using historical health data, residents were followed for 40 years – either from age 60 until their death, or up to age 100.

We calculated each participant’s risks of stroke, heart attack, hip fracture and various cancers, and compared those who survived to the age of 100 with their shorter-lived counterparts.

We found that centenarians not only had lower rates of disease in late-midlife, but they continued to have lower rates of disease throughout their life overall.

For example, at the age of 85, only 4% of those who lived to be centenarians had experienced a stroke. In comparison, around 10% of those who almost became centenarians – living to ages 90–99 – had experienced a stroke by age 85.

Moreover, despite living longer, their lifetime risk for most diseases never reached those of their shorter-lived peers. At the age of 100, 12.5% of centenarians had experienced a heart attack, compared to just over 24% among people who lived between the ages of 80 and 89. This suggests that centenarians delay – and in many cases even avoid – major age-related diseases, rather than simply surviving them more effectively.

One limitation of this study is that it only focused on analysing more serious diagnoses of major diseases. But what if the real key to longevity isn’t that centenarians avoid disease entirely – rather, it’s that they’re able to avoid developing serious diseases?

To explore this, we conducted a second study that included 40 different medical conditions. These conditions ranged from mild to severe – such as hypertension, heart failure, diabetes and heart attacks.

We looked at 274,108 participants who were born between 1920 and 1922 and who lived in Sweden. We followed participants for around 30 years – either from the age of 70 until their death or until they turned 100. A total of 4,330 people became centenarians – just 1.5% of the participants we looked at for the study.

Even after including a wider range of diseases and allowing participants to have more than one health condition in the analysis, our team came to the same conclusions as we did in the first study: centenarians developed fewer diseases – and their rate of disease accumulation was slower across their lifetime.

We also found that centenarians were more likely to have conditions limited to a single organ system. This is a sign of this group’s health and resilience, since diseases that affect one organ system are much easier to treat and manage in the long term.

For instance, while cardiovascular conditions were the most common diagnoses across all age groups, centenarians were less likely overall to be diagnosed compared to their short-lived companions. At the age of 80, around 8% of centenarians were diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. In comparison, more than 15% of people who died at the age of 85 had been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease by 80 years of age. The lower rates of cardiovascular disease appear to be central to the centenarians’ extended survival.

Centenarians also demonstrated greater resilience to neuropsychiatric conditions – such as depression and dementia – throughout life.

Although most centenarians eventually developed multiple health conditions, they did so much later in life than non-centenarians – usually around the age of 89. This was thanks to having fewer diseases and a slower rate of disease accumulation.

Notably, non-centenarians typically experienced a sharp increase in the number of health conditions they suffered with in the final years of their lives. But centenarians did not experience this same sharp decline in health – even from their 90s onward.

The secret to a long life?

The finding that centenarians manage to delay, and in some cases avoid, disease despite living longer is both intriguing and encouraging. It shows it’s possible to age more slowly than is typical – and challenges the common belief that a longer life inevitably comes with more disease.

Our findings suggest that exceptional longevity isn’t just about postponing illness but reflects a distinct pattern of ageing. But whether this is mainly due to genetics, lifestyle, environment or a combination of these factors remains unknown. The next step in our research will be to explore what factors predict living to 100 – and how such predictors operate during a person’s life.

Understanding the mechanisms behind healthy ageing in centenarians may offer valuable insights for promoting longer, healthier lives for all.

Karin Modig, Associate Professor, Epidemiology, Karolinska Institutet

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

Earlier this year, we asked a group of older adults what music they listened to when feeling lonely, and why. We discovered music was a powerful coping mechanism and source of escapism.

Other studies have also found listeners use music “to keep them company”. Such reports suggest music might be able shape listeners thoughts and imagination to provide social solace.

But can we establish scientifically how music affects imagination? In short, can music really be good company? Our latest research tried to find out.

Music and mental images

It’s common to experience mental imagery – that is a mental simulation or imagining something that is not there – while listening to music. Studies have found 77% of music listeners online, 73% of participants in the lab, and 83% of concert-goers report experiences of mental imagery during music listening.

What’s going on here? To get a better understanding, we previously carried out a series of experiments with mental imagery and music.

We showed participants a small clip from a video game called Journey, which featured a small figure travelling towards a mountain. We then asked them to imagine the continuation of the journey.

Participants reported how vivid or life-like their imagination was. In addition, they provided details on distance and time travelled in their mind and shared detailed descriptions of their imagined journeys.

Across multiple studies, we asked hundreds of participants to do the task in silence or while listening to various types of music. We observed much more vivid and emotionally positive imagination when listening to music. In addition, listeners’ imagined longer distances and time travelled when listening to music compared to silence.

Music shapes listeners’ imagination

Previous research has also found that what people imagine while listening to music often forms elaborate imagined stories. These share greater similarity among listeners with a shared cultural background.

Thoughts and themes in the imagined stories are shaped by the music. For example, heroic-sounding music induces empowering themes into imagined content.

Occurrences of new events in these imagined stories also tend to be similar between listeners, and are related to the pattern of musical tension and relief.

So there is strong scientific support for the idea that music can indeed affect what is imagined. But can it specifically induce imagined social interactions?

Our latest study is the first to explicitly investigate this question.

Does music make imagination more social?

We asked 600 participants to perform the imaginary journey task, either in silence or while listening to Italian, Spanish or Swedish folk music. To understand the potential effect of vocals and the meaning of lyrics on imagined content, the music was presented with or without lyrics to the participants, half of whom were native speakers and the other half non-speakers of the respective languages.

We then used tools from natural language processing – a set of computational methods for analysing language – to find underlying topics across participants’ reports of their imagined journeys.

One topic stood out: social interaction. Not only was it the predominant topic in participants’ reports of what they imagined, but it was also much stronger while listening to music compared to silence.

This suggests music can indeed affect social thought. The effect was stable regardless of whether listeners’ understood the lyrics or whether there even were lyrics in the first place.

But we can go one step further.

We used a generative AI system which produces images from text prompts (Stable Diffusion) to visualise participants’ descriptions of their imagined journeys.

By combining the natural language processing model with the image generator, we could visualise what the language processing model had learned to be a “stereotypical” representation of content imagined during silence and music listening.

The results of the computational model were further supported with manual annotations that showed three times more social interactions in journeys imagined during music listening compared to silence.

A shared imagination of music

Finally, we showed the images created from the descriptions to another group of people.

These people were able to pick out which images showed content imagined during music listening, and which showed content imagined while in silence – but they were only able to do it when listening to the same music that inspired the image.