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This year’s Winter Olympics will be held in northern Italy, starting on Friday.

They will be the most spread out in history: the two main competition sites – Milan and the winter resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo – are more than 400 kilometres apart.

Some 3500 athletes from 93 countries will compete in 16 sports for 245 gold medals.

What’s happening at the 2026 games?

Events are organised into broad categories, including ice sports (such as figure skating and curling), skiing and snowboarding (including moguls and halfpipe), Nordic events (such as cross-country and ski jumping) and sliding events (including skeleton and luge).

For the Milan Cortina games, the program has added eight new events designed to increase variety and gender parity.

The most significant addition is the sport of ski mountaineering, often referred to as “skimo”.

The sport requires competitors to ski uphill, transition to walking up steep climbs and then descend on skis.

The program will be the most gender-balanced winter games to date, with 47% women participation mainly thanks to the introduction of women’s double luge and a women’s large hill event in ski jumping.

While the Winter Olympics have been held in 21 cities in 13 different countries, climate change may limit the number of future host locations.

How the Winter Olympics began

The first Winter Olympics were held in Chamonix, France in 1924.

Current events such as figure skating and ice hockey were actually included in the Summer Olympics in 1908 and 1920.

Following the success of these events, and support from the father of the modern Olympics Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to hold a separate winter competition in 1924.

This competition was known as the “Winter Sports Week of the 8th Olympiad” and was retroactively recognised as the first Winter Olympics in 1926.

Many of the early Winter Olympics were held in the same year as the summer games – and in the same country.

While the Summer and Winter Olympics have not been held in the some country since 1936, they were held in the same year until 1992.

The IOC then altered their schedule so the summer and winter games were held on alternating even-numbered years.

IOC officials hoped this change would increase the importance of the winter games, which had been regarded as less important than the summer event.

This decision meant the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, were held only two years after the 1992 winter games in Albertville, France.

The next Olympics were the 1996 Summer Olympics, then the 1998 Winter Olympics.

This alternating format continues to this day.

Australia at the Winter Olympics

Australia’s first winter Olympian was speed skater Ken Kennedy in 1936.

Since then, Australia has competed in every Winter Olympics and its team has grown from one athlete in 1936 to more than 50 in recent games.

Speed skater Colin Coates has represented Australia at the most winter games: six times between 1968 and 1988.

It took 58 years for Australia to claim its first Winter Olympic medal in 1994. Steven Bradbury, Richard Nizielski, Andrew Murtha and Kieran Hansen won bronze in the 5,000m short track speed skating relay.

Bradbury also famously won Australia’s first Winter Olympic gold medal in the 1,000m speed skating in 2002.

Australia has won 19 Winter Olympic medals, including six gold.

It has achieved most success in freestyle skiing events such as aerials and mogul, led by multiple medal winners Alisa Camplin and Lydia Lassila.

Australia’s medal chances in 2026

Australia heads into these games with realistic medal chances in a small number of sports where it has consistently punched above its weight. This may seem surprising for a country better known for beaches than snow but targeted investment and athlete pathways have paid off.

Australia’s strongest gold medal hope is in freestyle skiing moguls, a fast downhill event where athletes ski over steep bumps while performing two jumps.

Jakara Anthony, who won gold in Beijing in 2022, has dominated international competitions since then, regularly winning World Cup events – the highest level of competition outside the Olympics.

Aerial skiing has also emerged as a genuine medal opportunity for Australia.

Laura Peel has continued her strong international form with recent World Cup gold, while Danielle Scott has also topped the podium this season.

With two athletes consistently winning at the highest level outside the Olympics, Australia is a genuine podium contender in this discipline.

Snowboarding also offers strong chances.

In snowboard halfpipe, riders launch out of a giant ice channel and perform aerial tricks while being judged on height, difficulty and style. Scotty James has been among the world’s best for almost a decade and has won multiple World Championship medals.

Australia is also building serious depth through younger athletes such as Valentino Guseli, who has already claimed World Cup gold and is emerging as a genuine podium contender.

In women’s monobob, Bree Walker’s recent World Cup gold shows Australia is now a genuine contender in one of the games’ newer disciplines.

In skeleton, where athletes race head-first down an icy track at speeds exceeding 120 kilometres per hour, Jaclyn Narracott won silver in 2022 – Australia’s first sliding sport medal. Another podium finish is possible for her.

Beyond these core medal prospects, sports such as short track speed skating could also feature in Australia’s medal mix if athletes peak at the right time, with potential for 2026 to rival Australia’s most successful Winter Olympics to date.

Vaughan Cruickshank, Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania; Brendon Hyndman, Associate Professor of Education and Associate Dean (Academic), Faculty of Arts and Education, Charles Sturt University, and Tom Hartley, Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania

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

A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited, with the potential to be a spectacular sight in early April.

C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was spotted by a team of four amateur astronomers with a remotely operated telescope in the Atacama desert on January 13.

It quickly became apparent the newly discovered object was a member of a group called the Kreutz sungrazing comets. These include many of the brightest and most spectacular comets ever seen.

Comet MAPS is moving on an extreme, highly elongated orbit around the Sun, and is diving towards a fiery date with our star. In early April the comet will pass within just 120,000km of the Sun’s surface.

If the comet survives, it could become a spectacular sight in the evening sky in early April. It may even become visible in broad daylight as it swings closest to the Sun – unless it falls apart before then.

So what makes these sungrazers so exciting, and what can we expect?

Fragments of a mega-comet

Over the past 2,000 years, a series of spectacular comets have graced our skies. Without fanfare, they appear seemingly from nowhere, shining remarkably close to the Sun in the sky. Some even become bright enough to be visible in broad daylight.

Historically, the brightest comets often become known as “Great Comets”. The Great Comet of 1965 – C/1965 S1 (Ikeya-Seki) – was the brightest comet of the 20th century. Discovered just one month before its closest approach to the Sun, it got as bright as the full Moon, and was easily visible with the naked eye during the day.

The Great Comet of 1882, C/1882 R1, was even more impressive. At its brightest, it was a hundred times brighter than the full Moon, dazzling in the sky for several months.

We now know that all these bright comets from the last two millennia – the Kreutz sungrazing family – share a common origin. At some point in the past (potentially in the 3rd or 4th century BCE), a giant cometary nucleus, more than 100km in diameter, came perilously close to the Sun’s surface. Some time after that close approach, far from the Sun, that comet split into two major fragments and shed lots of smaller pieces.

A few hundred years later, in the 3rd century CE, those pieces returned as they journeyed on their long orbit around the Sun. Reports from 363 CE suggest there may even have been multiple comets visible with the naked eye in broad daylight at the same time. Those returning pieces again fragmented.

In the eleventh century, the two largest remaining pieces of the ancient mega-comet swung by again, becoming the Great Comets of 1106 and 1138. Once again, the pieces fragmented – and the products of those fragmentations have been seen as a series of comets through the past two centuries.

We’ve been due for a big one

Today, the Kreutz sungrazing family contains a vast number of smaller comets which fall apart en-route towards the Sun, as well as larger pieces that can put on a fantastic show.

NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, has spotted thousands of Kreutz fragments over the years – tiny icebergs just metres or tens of metres across. Larger fragments swing by more rarely.

The most recent larger Kreutz sungrazer was visible in 2011. Discovered by Queensland astronomer Terry Lovejoy, the comet barely survived its close approach to the Sun, becoming as bright as the planet Venus in late December 2011.

According to the predictions of Czech-American astronomer Zdeněk Sekanina, we could potentially see two large, show-stopping sungrazers in the coming decades, with one potentially arriving in the next couple of years.

That comet would be a sibling to the Great Comets of 1965 and 1882, and a fragment of the Great Comet seen by Chinese observers in 1138.

Enter comet MAPS

Which all brings us to the newly discovered comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS). It’s moving on an orbit typical of Kreutz sungrazing comets, and already holds one record. At the time of its discovery, comet MAPS was farther from the Sun than any previous newly discovered sungrazer.

That suggests it might be a larger-than-usual fragment – perhaps.

The previous holder of this record was comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965, which proved to be the brightest of the 20th century. However, technology has moved on significantly in the past 70 years, and it seems very unlikely the nucleus of comet MAPS is as large as that of Ikeya-Seki. In turn, that makes it unlikely comet MAPS will be as bright.

Nevertheless, the fact we’ve caught it so early means it’s either a reasonably large Kreutz fragment, or it’s currently in outburst – already falling apart. Fortunately, recent observations have shown it steadily brightening, which points to the former theory.

What can we expect from the new comet?

Overall, it’s too soon to tell. If – and that’s a big if – the comet survives its closest approach to the Sun (known as perihelion), it could put on a great show in early to mid-April.

If it holds together, it might get bright enough to be visible in broad daylight. Even if that doesn’t happen, the SOHO spacecraft will provide great images of the comet.

In the days following perihelion, the comet will move into the evening sky. Thanks to its orbit, like all Kreutz comets it will be far easier to see from the southern hemisphere.

If the comet survives until perihelion, then fragments as it passes the Sun, it could brighten suddenly and unexpectedly. A late break-up might therefore be the best-case scenario for a dazzling show.

For now, we watch and wait.

Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

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

It’s 1917 and policewoman Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks is patrolling the parks of Adelaide, armed with a five-foot cane. She’s there to protect women from harm by enforcing a “three foot rule” to keep amorous couples at a safe distance from each other.

When not on morality police duties, she likes to shop in the recently opened Moore’s department store on Victoria Square, with its grand marble staircase, and its piano serenading the well-heeled clientele with cheery wartime songs.

This might seem like a fanciful premise for a historical crime fiction series. But Miss Kate Cocks, as she was usually known, did in fact exist. (So did Moore’s department store, before it was gutted by fire in 1948.) Cocks was the first woman police officer in the British Empire to be paid at the same rate as her male colleagues and granted similar powers of arrest.

In fact, she was the first policewoman in South Australia, which in 1894 became the first state to grant women the vote and the right to stand for parliament. (A year after New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.)

Review: The Death of Dora Black; Murder on North Terrace – by Lainie Anderson (Hachette)

Journalist and novelist Lainie Anderson discovered Cocks while randomly scrolling through her Twitter feed during the COVID pandemic. She then applied to the University of South Australia to do a PhD on Miss Cocks, aiming to make her the protagonist in a popular crime novel. This resulted in a two-book deal.

Anderson’s (still embargoed) thesis addressed the challenge, and ethics, of turning a real woman into a fictionalised character. Whatever her concerns might have been, The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace are fine additions to feminist historical crime fiction: perhaps best exemplified by the Miss Phryne Fisher mysteries written by the late Kerry Greenwood.

Indeed, Miss Cock’s fictional offsider, the indomitable Constable Ethel Bromley, is somewhat reminiscent of Phryne. Ethel is also wealthy and beautiful. She, too, entertains a lover and practices birth control. As one of Ethel’s aunts admiringly tells her: “You are our future selves”.

It’s a clever ploy, placing the “paradoxical” real-life character of Miss Cocks, with her reverence for motherhood and perplexing opposition to birth control and abortion, in a close working relationship with a character who embraces views much more in keeping with contemporary beliefs about women’s rights. This juxtaposition effectively stages a dialogue between past and present attitudes.

“In my opinion, a mother is the nearest thing to God upon this earth, because she, too, creates,” Cocks – who, in real life, founded a refuge for babies after her retirement – told The Advertiser in 1936. “That is why I am so opposed to all the abortive practices nowadays.”

But importantly, what Kate and Ethel share is their desire to protect women.

Revealing fashion and complex characters

While women may have achieved more control over their bodies since 1917, both The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace deal with crimes involving rape and domestic violence. Sadly, the persistence of these crimes today suggests the times may not have changed as much as we might hope.

The Death of Dora Black begins with the discovery of a young woman’s body under the jetty at Glenelg beach. The only clues are two small vials of opium and an expensive art nouveau purse. This is the motivating crime that will drive the primary narrative. However, it’s the incidental characters and descriptions of Adelaide that give these books their depth and heft.

Then, we are introduced to Miss Cocks as she shops in Moore’s department store for a pair of new shoes exactly the same as her old ones, but in a different colour. At five foot six inches, Miss Cocks is taller than the average woman of the time, and as “neat as a pin” in a “light green, ankle-length silk frock with an understated ruffle at the throat and a fitted waist”. Anderson’s fashion notes are precise – and revelatory in terms of what they might tell us about the characters.

Miss Cocks appears to be a 41-year-old, straight-laced, buttoned-up spinster. However, she is also a product of both her time and social circumstances – and all the more complex for that.

Ethel, on the other hand, is 27, exuberant and prone to wearing military-inspired outfits with much higher hemlines. She has also been learning jujitsu to great effect, having flattened a “mountain of a man” at the Port Adelaide docks who was pestering her. She would like to be a detective.

Over the course of the two books, set in January and September of 1917, respectively, Miss Cocks and Ethel’s working relationship deepens. As we are told in the second book, they develop “an unspoken appreciation of one another’s strengths and a sympathetic acceptance of their weaknesses” through their shared experiences, and the challenges they face together.

Murder ‘a welcome distraction’

The two female police officers are required to work an overwhelming 60 hours a week, with one Sunday off in every six. For the most part, this work is routine and exhausting. It involves daily trips to the Adelaide Railway Station to meet unaccompanied, vulnerable young women and ensure their future safety; walking the city’s parklands to catch couples in flagrante; and patrolling the suburbs to monitor domestic disputes. The murders they become involved in are something of a welcome distraction.

In Murder on North Terrace, this involves the death of the South Australian Art Gallery’s head in front of a controversial painting he has championed. Miss Cocks, meanwhile, is facing domestic crime of a different order involving a man who locks his wife in a truck every night to prevent her entering the house.

Anderson skilfully blends truth and fiction. The controversial painting, Sowing New Seed by William Orpen, did indeed exist. It caused quite a stir at the time, as did the case of the wife padlocked in the truck. Only the murder in the gallery is a fiction.

Real – and ever present – is the backdrop of the first world war. (This is also the backdrop of Anderson’s debut novel, Long Flight Home, also based on historical research and real people.) From the pianist in Moore’s department store playing Pack Up Your Troubles on repeat, to the returned soldiers in Victoria Square, “broken men with missing limbs and lost hope”, the impact of the war on the inhabitants of Adelaide is a constant theme.

In Murder on North Terrace, the war moves centre stage. Miss Cocks and Ethel are now on duty at the Cheer-Up Hut in Elder Park, a home away from home for new recruits and 300 recently returned South Australian soldiers.

As they watch a young amputee threaten to throw himself off a balcony and into the arms of a young woman he has just met, they are once again presented with forces beyond their control: including love, lust and the notorious six o’clock swill – not to mention a predatory rapist.

At least Ethel gets to play the detective, if only briefly. She also receives a marriage proposal – which completely confounds her, since this would mean resigning from the job she loves. Ethel may be a fictional character, but there’s a hard truth here. My own mother experienced it in 1937, when she was forced to give up her job in the United Kingdom as a result of a similar marriage bar.

Given the ongoing dialogue between fact and fiction, if I have any criticism to make of The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace, it is that they should have come with a map of Adelaide in 1917. I keenly wanted to trace Miss Cocks and Ethel’s movements through the city as they went about their business of saving women and solving crime.

Publishers take note: there’s the opportunity for a crime walk here. There, readers might investigate for themselves the relationship between the real and the imaginary that Anderson so effectively blurs. At the same time, she gives us a compelling portrait of what life might have felt like in Adelaide at that time.

Such is the power of good crime fiction that touches the heart as well as the mind – while inspiring a desire to play history detective.

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.

In early 20th century Australia, Indigenous people were denied citizenship and the nation had a racially exclusive immigration policy. Most people not only accepted the “White Australia” policy but openly identified with its assumption of white supremacy. Popular culture was replete with overtly racist terms and images.

Even after World War II, as Australians began to focus on their region and nearby colonies threw off their imperial rulers, acceptance of “White Australia” continued for many.

Yet from the late 1940s, some Australians began to question the racial inequality on which colonialism relied. By 1975, when the Whitlam government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, racially exclusive immigration had been jettisoned and First Nations people had legal equality, albeit not parity.

Such a profound shift in popular consensus did not occur spontaneously. Here are ten key Australians who prodded the country to question its own thinking on race.

1. H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt

In early 1945, as Minister for External Affairs and Attorney-General, Dr H.V. Evatt (1894–1965) co-led the Australian deputation to the United Nations’ founding conference. He helped to shape the UN Charter dealing with colonies, requiring their development towards independence.

As president of the third session of the UN General Assembly, on 10 December 1948, Evatt presided over the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

His niece, lawyer and jurist Elizabeth Evatt, recalled that her Uncle Bert held the idea of human rights close to his heart and saw the declaration as the first step in a process. She also pointed to Australia’s role in formulating Chapter XI of the UN Charter, calling it a stimulus to decolonisation.

As a supporter of White Australia, Evatt was inconsistent as a critic of colonialism. But his role in the adoption of the declaration, which is so often invoked in support of human rights and equality, should be a matter of pride in this country.

2. Jessie Street

Jessie Street (1889–1970) was a leading feminist in the 1940s and the only woman on the Australian delegation to the 1945 UN conference. Street helped to insert the phrase “the equal rights of men and women” in the preamble of the UN Charter. She also pushed for a commission to be established to deal with the status of women.

Street and other women delegates fought to include the word “sex” in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights statement. Respect for human rights was to be without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

She knew Evatt and praised his influential work at the early UN. But unlike Evatt, she had no reservations about condemning colonialism. In the mid–1950s, Street investigated the conditions of Indigenous Australians for the London Anti-Slavery Society, writing an important report and working with Indigenous activists such as Pearl Gibbs.

In 1964, Street visited Ghana, then led by socialist President Kwame Nkrumah. It wasn’t only his socialist program she admired, nor his commitment to gender equality. She also applauded his vision of redressing the historical wrongs of imperialism, slavery and exploitation, and praised his “burning resentment against race discrimination and other aspects of the old colonial regime”.

3. Pearl Gibbs

Pearl Gambanyi Gibbs (1901-1983), whose maternal ancestry was Ngemba or Muruwari, helped to organise the Aborigines Progressive Association, the 1938 Day of Mourning protest, the Australian Aborigines’ League, the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

She played a vital role in the movement leading to the 1967 Referendum, which would include Indigenous people in the census and empower the Commonwealth government to legislate for them. Gibbs was an advocate for workers, one of Australia’s leading human rights activists and a link between the women’s and Aboriginal rights movements.

Gibbs saw and articulated the structural nature of colonial oppression within Australia. In 1941, she gave a radio address, arranged by the Theosophical Society of Sydney. Identifying proudly as “a quarter-caste Aborigine”, she condemned “153 years of the white man’s and white woman’s cruelty and injustice and unchristian treatment”.

She pointed to segregation in picture halls, churches and elsewhere, urging: “When I say that we are Australia’s untouchables you must agree with me”.

4. Faith Bandler

Faith Bandler’s father was from Ambrym (in what is now Vanuatu), brought to work on the Queensland sugar plantations. Her mother was half-Indian and half-Scottish. While not Indigenous, Bandler (1918–2015) knew racism all too well.

After serving in the Women’s Land Army, in the postwar years she joined politically progressive circles in bohemian Sydney. She became a prominent advocate for racial equality.

By 1956, Gibbs and Bandler had begun the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, an organisation dedicated to campaigning for Indigenous rights. Bandler became general secretary of its successor. She played a key role in the 1967 Referendum and, as her biographer Marilyn Lake contends, the meaningful achievement of equal citizenship for Aboriginal people.

In an interview, Bandler explained that her activism was influenced by her childhood experiences of racism, and knowledge of its global, structural dimensions:

[T]he stories my father told me of his treatment, being kidnapped from the islands and working on the canefields as a slave, did influence my thinking […] I knew about the slave trade, and we always sang the slave songs in the evenings […] So I knew, even as a very young kid, that black people somehow had their place, and it was in the place of serving white people.

5. Charles Duguid

Dr Charles Duguid (1884-1986) was a prominent campaigner for Aboriginal rights from the 1930s onwards. Duguid founded Ernabella mission, for the Pitjantjatjara people in northwest South Australia in 1937. This mission was regarded as extraordinarily progressive in its cultural sensitivity and efforts to preserve language and customs.

Duguid advocated publicly for the significance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quoting from its preamble: “Disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of humankind”. He then observed: “From 1788 to 1900 this happened all too often in Australia.”

Duguid often drew comparisons between Australia and South Africa. More than once, Duguid finished an address with the ominous remark: “Asia is looking on”. The statement called into question Australia’s regional standing among both its colonised and newly independent neighbours.

6. Kylie Tennant

Kylie Tennant (1912–1988), one of Australia’s most prominent writers in the mid-20th century, was known especially for her socialist realist portrayals of the hardships of the working class and unemployed – occasionally referred to as Australia’s John Steinbeck.

Tennant was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement and won praise from George Orwell. In the late 1950s, she used her public platform to draw attention to the terrible consequences of colonialism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the far north. Her books Speak You So Gently and All the Proud Tribesmen sold well nationally and internationally.

Tennant’s determined use of humour as a vehicle to show all of her characters – Indigenous and settler – as individuals with personalities was undergirded by her awareness of racism, not least on the part of some government officials and mining company prospectors. Condemning discrimination and abysmal living conditions, Tennant evoked the richness of Indigenous cultures and community life.

Her travel writing and fiction brought First Nations people in the north to metropolitan attention – as she had done in the 1930s and early 1940s with the unemployed and the very poor.

7. Don Dunstan

Don Dunstan (1926-1999) was a democratic socialist South Australian Labor MP, a national political figure and cultural celebrity. As Premier of SA from 1967–68 and 1970–79, Dunstan pioneered legislative and policy reform establishing Aboriginal land rights and prohibiting discrimination.

In 1957, he gained international attention as an outspoken critic of British colonialism in Cyprus. In 1960–61, Dunstan served as president of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. In 1965, he played a key role in the removal of the White Australia policy from the federal ALP platform. In June 1969, he said, as reported in the Tribune:

Australia cannot continue to be lumped in most people’s minds with South Africa as a country basing its policies on racial discrimination […] Outside Australia, people who have heard of us for the most part don’t know much about our country but there is one thing they all know – the White Australia Policy.

In the late 80s and the 90s, he was president of the Mandela Foundation of Australia and presided over the Australian branch of the Movement for Democracy in Fiji, while being a leading voice for Australia to become a republic.

8. Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) (1920–1993) was a poet and Indigenous rights activist. Noonuccal grew up on Minjerribah/North Stradbroke Island. She became a domestic servant before joining the Australian Women’s Army Service in World War II. A player and advocate for women’s cricket, she worked as a stenographer and house cleaner.

Her political skills were first honed in the Communist Party, which she left before becoming a writer. From the 1960s, Walker/Noonuccal was celebrated for her powerfully evocative poetry and as an internationally prominent political figure fighting for Aboriginal rights.

In 1969, Walker told the Journalists’ Club in Sydney that missionaries

have convinced themselves they are Christianising the Aboriginal but in truth they continue to brutalise the black man by trying to turn him into a black white man.

The old government policy of assimilation had done nothing to help Aboriginal people, and the new policy of integration was merely a word change: “At present, Aboriginals are given the rights to live upon the rubbish dumps of the white society”.

Noonuccal received many awards and accolades, and was recognised for founding her Indigenous learning centre Moongalba on Minjerribah.

9. Charles Perkins

Charles Perkins (1936–2000) was born on an Aboriginal reserve near Mparntwe/Alice Springs. His strongest memory was

the fact that we just weren’t allowed into Alice Springs, which was only 2 miles away. Often we used to go for walks towards Alice Springs and look over the hills […] and the white people for us, well, they were like moon-men I suppose.

Later he was sent to an institution for Aboriginal boys in Adelaide for schooling. He worked as a fitter and turner, prior to becoming a professional soccer player, a career that took him to England.

His activism began in the mid-1950s as a young man in Adelaide. While studying at University of Sydney, he hit national headlines in 1965 when he led the Freedom Ride student protest against segregation and discrimination in New South Wales country towns.

Perkins’ path-breaking career as a public servant culminated as secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. The photo above, of Perkins speaking at the Tent Embassy while he was secretary, captures his ability to balance activism and senior administration. Long a powerful national voice on Aboriginal rights, in the 1990s he served on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

10. Roberta Sykes

Roberta Sykes (1943-2010) was the daughter of an Australian mother and African–American father. Of her childhood in Townsville in the 1940s-50s, Sykes would recall:

As children, we were overwhelmed with the history, images and successes of white people to the extent that we could not have been blamed for doubting our own existence and worth and the existence and worth of all, and any, other Black people.

Forced out of school early by racism, she became a nurse, before working as a journalist. She helped to found the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, among many other entities. In the early 1970s, as a prominent activist for Aboriginal rights, Sykes was invited to speak on racism, rights and colonialism in countries including the UK, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

She earned her PhD at Harvard University, held positions in academia and as a consultant, and was awarded the 1994 Australian Human Rights Medal. In 1986, in her Australia Day address to the National Press Club, she condemned the fact that “Australian Aborigines were still living under siege almost 200 years after white people arrived on their land”.

These ten Australians collaborated on many fronts. Evatt and Street worked together at the UN from 1945 to 1949. Tennant wrote the first biography of Evatt. Street connected with Gibbs and Bandler to ignite the movement for constitutional change that resulted in the 1967 referendum.

Duguid and Dunstan worked in the 1959 campaign against the death penalty conviction of Arrernte man Rupert Maxwell Stewart. Dunstan — who was something of a mentor to Perkins — and Noonuccal were both invited delegates to a historically important convention on racism held by the World Council of Churches in London in 1969.

Noonuccal and Sykes, while different generations, bonded as Black women from Queensland, both poets and activists. The ten’s connections were links in vital intellectual and political networks, whose webs spread outwards and crossed the country.

Of course, the work of this cohort alone did not change Australia, and many other individuals could – and perhaps should – be added to such a list. But these ten each made singular contributions to the formidable task of changing a nation’s mind.

Angela Woollacott, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History, Australian National University

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

The South Australian state election will be held on March 21. Preferential voting will be used to elect members for all 47 single-member lower house seats. This is the same system as used for federal House of Representatives elections.

Some Australian conservatives are advocating Australia return to first past the post (FPTP), but a conservative government introduced preferential voting in 1918 to stop vote splitting between two conservative parties. Right-wing preferences helped the Coalition maintain its grip on power from 1949 to 1972. Preferential voting is far superior to FPTP.

After Labor’s landslide at the May 2025 federal election, some right-wingers have complained that preferential voting gave Labor too many seats. They want Australia to revert to FPTP, where there are no preferences. In FPTP, the candidate with the most votes wins the seat.

National primary votes at the election were 34.6% Labor, 31.8% Coalition, 12.2% Greens, 6.4% One Nation and 15.0% for all Others. After preferences, Labor defeated the Coalition by 55.2–44.8 and won 94 of the 150 House of Representatives seats (63% of seats). In both two-party and seat share, this was Labor’s biggest win since 1943.

While Labor’s margin expanded after preferences, they won the national primary vote by 2.8%. Analyst Kevin Bonham said that on primary votes, Labor would have won 86 seats to 57 for the Coalition (actual 94 to 43). Labor’s primary votes were much more efficiently distributed than the Coalition’s.

Labor won a disproportionate seat share at the election, but this occurs with single-member systems, particularly with a blowout result. Those complaining about Labor’s big majority should advocate switching to proportional representation, not FPTP.

The United Kingdom 2024 election was held using FPTP. Labour won 411 of the 650 seats (63% of seats) on 33.7% of the national vote. This occurred primarily because Labour’s vote share was ten points ahead of the second placed Conservatives.

A brief history of preferential voting in Australia

Prior to 1918, federal elections used FPTP. In 1918, there was a byelection for Swan that was contested by the Nationalists (a predecessor of the Liberals), the Country Party (a predecessor of the Nationals) and Labor.

Labor won this byelection with 34.4%, to 31.4% for the Country Party and 29.6% for the Nationalists. With the combined vote for the two conservative options adding to 61.0%, it was clear a different system would have given the Country Party the win.

After this byelection, the Nationalist government introduced preferential voting, resulting in Labor losing the Corangamite byelection in 1918 to a Victorian Farmers candidate by 56.3–43.7, despite Labor winning the primary vote by 42.5–26.4 with 22.9% for the Nationalists.

Originally preferential voting was introduced to allow the two conservative parties (now Liberals and Nationals) to compete against each other without splitting the conservative vote and giving Labor wins it didn’t deserve. There are still “three-cornered” contests now where the Liberals, Nationals and Labor all contest the same seat.

This Wikipedia page gives national primary votes for Labor, the Coalition and all Others, the Labor and Coalition estimated two-party share and House seats won by Labor, Coalition and others at elections from 1910 to 2022.

Until the 1990s, the combined primary votes for the major parties was around 90% in most elections. This means that other than in three-cornered contests, preferences had limited impact. There were high Other votes in 1931, ‘34, '40 and '43, with the first three cases due to a Labor split (New South Wales Lang Labor).

In the first two of these cases, Labor was far behind on primary votes and made up some ground on preferences, but the Coalition still won easily. In 1940, Labor trailed by 3.7% on primary votes but won the two-party vote by 50.3–49.7. However, the Coalition formed government with the support of two independents until those independents sided with Labor in 1941.

In 1943, there was a split within the Coalition, and other preferences favoured the Coalition, reducing Labor’s primary vote lead of 26.9 points to 16.4 points after preferences.

In 1955, a Labor faction split from Labor and became the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), directing preferences to the Coalition. From 1955 until the DLP’s demise in 1974, it dominated the third party vote, and so overall preferences in this period assisted the Coalition.

The DLP helped the Coalition to have the longest period of one-party government from 1949 to 1972. Labor was estimated to have won the two-party vote in 1954, 1961 and 1969, but the Coalition won a majority of House seats.

Since 1987, preferences have favoured Labor, allowing it to overturn primary vote deficits to win the two-party vote in 1987, 2010 and 2022. First the Democrats and then the Greens assisted Labor after preferences. One Nation’s first rise at the 1998 election didn’t stop overall preferences from favouring Labor.

The only time Labor formed government while losing the two-party vote occurred in 1990, when they won a majority of seats despite losing by 50.1–49.9. Labor lost the election in 1998, even though it won the two-party vote by 51.0–49.0.

Some recent polls have One Nation surging into second place behind Labor, ahead of the Coalition. On current polling, there are more right-wing sources of preferences than left-wing sources, so overall preference flows could favour the right at the next federal election, whether it’s One Nation or the Coalition that benefits most.

In early elections, some seats were often uncontested, meaning only one candidate nominated for that seat. No votes were counted in such seats, so national primary votes will be distorted by the exclusion of these seats.

Why preferential voting is superior to FPTP

At the 2025 election, Labor’s Ali France defeated Liberal leader Peter Dutton in his seat of Dickson by 56.0–44.0. But Dutton had more primary votes than France, winning 34.7% of the primary vote to 33.6% for France, with 12.2% for a teal independent, 7.6% for the Greens and 4.2% for One Nation.

FPTP gives a massive benefit to the side of politics (left or right) that has its vote more concentrated with one party or candidate. In the two 1918 byelections, the left vote was concentrated with Labor, and in Dickson 2025 the right vote was concentrated with Dutton. Preferential voting is far fairer by allowing all candidates’ votes to eventually count.

In FPTP, many voters need to choose between supporting the candidate they most prefer even if that candidate is uncompetitive, and voting for the candidate best placed to keep someone they dislike out. Votes for uncompetitive candidates are effectively wasted in FPTP.

Labor may have won Dickson under FPTP as some of the teal and Greens voters would probably have voted for Labor tactically to beat Dutton. But voters shouldn’t need to make these choices.

Parliaments require majorities to function. The party winning the most seats does not necessarily form government, for example Labour formed government after the 2017 New Zealand election even though the conservative National won the most seats.

In the UK, the Conservatives needed to form alliances with other parties after winning the most seats but not a majority at the 2010 and 2017 elections. Preferential voting is closer to parliamentary systems than FPTP.

Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

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

Phil is in prep for surgery. As the anaesthetic is about to be administered, the anaesthetist says: “Oh, and by the way, during the procedure the surgical team will be listening to the hard rock classic, You Shook Me All Night Long.”

Does Phil say, “STOP! I’m getting out of here”?

Perhaps he shouldn’t. According to one study, by listening to AC/DC during surgery, doctors can improve their performance. Use of music in operating theatres has had mixed results but the study – which looked at young surgeons working on laparoscopic procedures at a hospital in Dresden while listening to various different kinds of background music – found background music reduced surgeons’ anxiety. And who wants an anxious surgery team, right?

Particularly for boring, repetitive jobs, music can help. Locking into the beat (psychologists call this “rhythmic entrainment”) means your actions sync with the beat of the music, which can make routine tasks feel smoother and faster.

Put melody and beat together and, after a bit of practice, you too might be working like this postal officer – who even supplies his own melody.

When else does music help you at work?

Background music often doesn’t help with memory and language tasks, such as reading comprehension and reading speed, especially when the music contains lyrics. When you’re processing words, extra words supplied by the song are competing for attention.

Difficult, complex tasks are also hindered by music.

But what about that surgery team? Aren’t they performing among the highest-stakes tasks of all? The key is expertise. An experienced medical professional typically carries a lower “cognitive load” for familiar procedures, leaving mental bandwidth to spare. In those circumstances, a bit of music might steady the nerves without crowding out attention.

But personality matters: people on the shy or introverted side are more likely to find background music distracting than extroverts who thrive on stimulation.

The music genre matters, too. Jazz standards might help one person focus, and drive another around the bend, while the latest K-pop hits might do no more than help you procrastinate from that already overdue task.

And volume matters. Not too soft, and the music can cover up or “mask” unwanted, unpredictable, distracting noise like office chatter, café clatter, library whispers, or (heaven help you), shopping centre din. The goal isn’t loudness; it’s control over your soundscape.

Why is music such a popular work companion?

Music occupies your ears. That leaves your eyes – and your hands – free to get on with the job.

Music can sometimes support tactile and kinaesthetic work, such as our postal worker cancelling stamps with a beat and a ditty. He was able to watch what he was doing, while singing and stomping away.

Intriguingly, even though music is a sound signal, the ear can deal with the auditory airwaves containing other sounds more gracefully than the eye can with visuals. Trying to work while listening to music is very different than trying to work while watching television. This holds true even when you need to be listening to something as part of your work.

Our brains are surprisingly good at separating simultaneous sound sources. This ability is called “auditory scene analysis”: the brain’s way of separating mixed sounds into distinct sources – like picking out one voice in a noisy room.

So audio tasks – such as listening to instructions or taking dictation – can still be performed with background music, though performance may be somewhat reduced compared with silence. But the ear can juggle streams in a way the eye often can’t.

Music also provides us with joy. Music can spark powerful experiences – belonging, awe, tenderness, thrills – states that can boost mood and motivation. That’s why some people can’t help plugging in.

If music ever starts to get in the way of focused work, another strategy is to take a “music break”: get a quick hit of your favourite tracks to elevate mood, then return to the task refreshed.

Putting it into practice

If you want to experiment, try this quick checklist:

• match the music to the task: embrace rhythm for repetitive or motor tasks; favour instrumentals for reading, writing or anything word heavy

• mind the lyrics: words in your music compete with words in your head

• keep it moderate: play music at a volume enough to mask distractions, not enough to dominate attention

• know thyself: if you’re easily overstimulated, keep sessions short or choose calmer genres such as lo fi, ambient or soft classical

• use breaks strategically: if music distracts while you work, save it for short “fuel up” breaks to restore mood and focus.

But there is no hard and fast rule. Recall our hard rock–loving surgeons? No lo-fi for them. But for the record, the surgery went just fine with the gentler Beatles classic, aptly titled Let It Be. And music’s not for everyone. For some, the surest way to stay tuned in to work is to not tune in at all.

Emery Schubert, Professor, Empirical Musicology Laboratory, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney

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

Paleontologists at the Canadian Museum of Nature have recently been studying the skeletal remains of a rhinoceros. This might not sound remarkable at first, but what makes these remains fascinating is that they were found on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic.

Today, mammals inhabit nearly every corner of the Earth. In Asia, Europe and North America, mammals arrived via three routes, one over the Bering Strait and two over the North Atlantic.

The Bering Land Bridge is the best known, having enabled the arrival of humans in North America approximately 20,000 years ago and shaped the population genetics of animals such as bears, lions and horses.

Less well known are the two routes that traversed the North Atlantic, one from the Scandinavian Peninsula over Svalbard and Greenland, and another from Scotland over Iceland to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic.

However, it has typically been thought that land animals could not have crossed the North Atlantic by the Early Eocene, a period around 50 million years ago when the Earth’s climate was warmer.

However, the Arctic rhino’s remains provide tantalizing evidence that land mammals were able to traverse the North Atlantic using frozen land bridges much more recently than the Early Eocene.

A rhinoceros in the Arctic

The new species of rhinoceros was discovered from a nearly complete specimen collected from the Haughton Formation of Devon Island in Nunavut — lake sediments formed in an asteroid impact crater that likely date to the Early Miocene, around 23 million years ago.

The sediments of the Haughton Formation preserve plants, mammals and birds, among others. The majority of the rhinoceros was collected in the 1980s by paleontologist Mary Dawson and her team, with additional collections by paleontologists Natalia Rybczynski, Marisa Gilbert and their team in the 2010s.

The rhinoceros lacked a horn, which is common among extinct rhinos. It is remarkable, however, in possessing features of much more ancient forms, like teeth of forms many millions of years older. It also has a fifth toe on the forefoot, which is rare among rhinoceroses.

Anatomical comparison and evolutionary analysis suggest the specimen belongs to an existing genus, Epiaceratherium, found only in Europe and western Asia. In naming the new species, the team consulted with Jarloo Kiguktak, an elder from the nearest Indigenous community to the Haughton Crater, Aujuittuq (Grise Fiord). Together, they named it Epiaceratherium itjilik. Itjilik is an Inuktitut word meaning frost or frosty, an homage to the Arctic setting where the specimen was found.

Most surprisingly, the team’s evolutionary analysis placed E. itjilik closest to the European species of Epiaceratherium. This indicates that its ancestors likely crossed from Europe to North America via the North Atlantic at some point during the late Eocene period around 33-38 million years ago.

Bio-geographic analyses further revealed a surprisingly high number of rhinoceros crossings over the North Atlantic directly between Europe and North America, some in the last 20 million years. While a finding of such a recent crossing via the North Atlantic has often been considered unlikely, emerging geological evidence tells a different story.

How did rhinos get to the Arctic?

Today, land animals are impeded from crossing between Europe and North America by several deep, wide waterways. The Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland are separated by the Faroe-Bank Channel, Faroe Shetland Channel and the Denmark Strait. Between the Scandinavian Peninsula, Svalbard and Greenland are the Barents Sea and Fram Strait. It is believed that land animals could traverse at least one of these areas only up until the Early Eocene about 50 million years ago.

Recent studies, however, are starting to paint a more complex picture of North Atlantic geological change. Estimates for the timing of formation of the various channels that now break up North Atlantic land masses are highly variable.

Mathematical modelling suggests a highland connected Svalbard to northern Europe as recently as the 2.7 million years ago. An array of new data also suggest the Fram Strait was shallow and narrow until the Early Miocene, around 23 million years ago. The Faroe-Shetland channel may have opened between 50 and 34 million years ago, while the Iceland-Faroe Channel and Denmark Strait were submerged later, 34 to 10 million years ago.

This suggests that rhinoceroses could have walked on land for at least part of their journey across the North Atlantic. They could possibly have swum the relatively short distances between land masses but the team hypothesized that seasonal sea ice may also have facilitated their movement.

Seasonal ice

More than 47 million years ago, the Arctic Ocean and surrounding regions were ice-free all year. Ocean cores collected from the Arctic Ocean — samples of mud, sand and organic material drilled from the seafloor — contain evidence of ice-rafted debris during the Middle Eocene, approximately 47 to 38 million years ago. This indicates the presence of seasonal ice.

Another ocean core collected between Greenland and Svalbard also contains ice-rafted debris originating from across the Arctic dating from between 48 to 26 million years ago. What is emerging, therefore, is the possibility that land animals crossed the North Atlantic by a combination of routes formed over land and seasonal ice.

Vertebrate fossils from the islands that once comprised the North Atlantic land bridges are extremely rare. Given that much of the land bridges are now submerged, direct evidence for how animals spread across the North Atlantic may be lost.

Bio-geographic studies like the one conducted by the team at the Canadian Museum of Nature highlight how discoveries in the Arctic are reshaping what we know about mammal evolution. These insights further our understanding of how animals moved across our planet.

Danielle Fraser, Head & Research scientist, Palaeobiology, Canadian Museum of Nature & Adjunct Research Professor, Department of Biology, Carleton University

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

There are few dynasties in history as well-known as the Tudors. From Henry VIII’s six wives to Elizabeth I’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Tudors continue to capture imaginations.

While sex, power and public execution provide endless entertainment, if you ask me, the enduring popularity of the Tudors is down to one factor – their magnificent fashion.

Dress was serious business in Tudor England. Clothing was its own language with each textile, colour and style carrying a different meaning. This allowed people to display their identity, status, and even send political messages.

From the Elizabethan Ruff to Henry VIII’s codpiece, here are five Tudor fashions which should make a comeback.

1. The linen shift

Sounds like a boring place to start, but the linen shift was a staple in every Tudor wardrobe.

Linen was inexpensive, breathable and could be laundered daily. Contrary to popular belief, the Tudors were obsessed with cleanliness and hygiene. Linen absorbs sweat, bodily fluids and was believed to protect the skin from diseases such as the plague. Wearing and changing your linen shift daily was the best way to stay clean and protected from infection.

A fashionable trend of the Tudor period saw the collar on the linen shift become larger so it could be seen under the outer garments. A clean collar demonstrated that you could afford to change your shift and therefore had good hygiene.

You know what they say, cleanliness is close to godliness.

2. The ruff

If there is a single item of clothing that is most redolent of the Tudors, it’s the ruff.

The ruff was a pleated collar made from linen or lace and given its iconic stiff shape with starch. During the reign of Elizabeth I, large lace ruffs became an elaborate status symbol because they were difficult to set and impractical to wear which meant you had to have a lot of servants helping you.

For Elizabeth I, the ruff was a significant source of power. The queen’s opulent ruffs commanded deference and situated her as the ultimate object in any room. In Elizabeth’s court, people came to her, not the other way around.

Dior gave the ruff a modern twist in their 2025 Fall–Winter collection, so it looks like they are already making a comeback.

3. Statement sleeves

In the Tudor period, sleeves were a separate garment that were attached while getting dressed in the morning. This allowed the wearer to pair them with different outfits and play around with fabrics, colours and styles.

The most popular style was the trumpet sleeve. This sleeve was narrow at the top of the arm and dramatically expanded in a cone shape over the elbow. A second sleeve would then appear underneath at the forearm.

This gave any outfit a dramatic and voluminous appearance with layers of luxurious textiles. See how this beautiful design looked on a young Elizabeth I.

A modern take on statement sleeves would be a great way to spice up any outfit.

4. Decorative techniques

Tudor tailors used a range of decorative techniques when making clothes. Paning, pinking and cutwork were just some of the more elaborate modes of garment construction but the most common was slashing.

Slashing involved cutting small slits into outer garments of velvet to reveal an inner layer of white silk. The layering and contrast of different colours not only created a striking and vibrant image but showed off your ownership of expensive textiles.

You can see slashing on Henry VIII’s doublet (jacket) and sleeves in his famous portrait.

In 1991, this technique inspired Vivienne Westwood to produce the collection Cut and Slash, so it definitely has a place in the modern era.

5. The codpiece

Ok, this one is a bit of fun… but for Henry VIII the codpiece was no laughing matter. Starting out as a small triangular piece of material, by the early 16th century the codpiece had evolved into a padded, stiff and bejewelled item symbolic of virility and fertility.

Toxic masculinity was all the rage during the Tudor period, and Henry VIII was under immense pressure to maintain absolute control through his superior machismo.

As the king aged, his vigour waned and his failure to produce a male heir sent him into a crisis of masculinity. The display and exaggeration of his manhood through the codpiece was Henry’s only means of reasserting his masculine identity and fecundity.

Henry’s 1540 tournament armour gives a clear indication of just how exaggerated the codpiece became.

One thing is for sure, fashion in Tudor England was not a flippant pursuit. If the ever-enduring legacy of the Tudors can teach us anything, it’s that we should always dress to impress.

Grace Waye-Harris, Early Career Researcher in History, Adelaide University

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

In her acceptance speech for best pop vocal album at the 68th Grammy Awards ceremony last night, Lady Gaga shone a light on the challenges that women face in studios. “It can be hard,” she said. “So, I urge you to always listen to yourself and … fight for your songs, fight for yourself as a producer. Make sure that you are heard, loudly,” she continued, placing the onus on women to take control of the fight for equality in music.

Many well-established and new female superstars were indeed heard loudly last night in the broadcast, which clearly made sure to display gender balance in front of the camera. However, when it comes to awards, nominations and the wider industry the picture is much different.

Working with my business partner, strategist Richard Addy, I looked at gender representation across all 95 of this year’s Grammy categories. Our analysis reveals that women and female bands sustained a dramatic fall in winners compared to last year. They received less than a quarter of all Grammys (23%), a 14 percentage point drop from last year’s high of 37% and the lowest level since 2022.

This fall has been partly a reflection of women’s declining recognition as Grammy nominees. Women’s representation peaked at under a third (28%) of all nominations last year, and this year just one in four nominations (24%) were given to women.

Despite Lady Gaga’s encouraging words for women to own their music as producers, their fight for a seat at the producers’ table is yet to yield results. Since its introduction 51 years ago, no woman has ever won the coveted Grammy for producer of the year, non-classical. Last year, Alissia became only the tenth woman to even earn a nomination in the category but lost out to Daniel Nigro. This year, all five nominees were male.

Addy and I have previously conducted a year-long data-led investigation of over 9,700 Grammy nominations and over 2,200 wins between 2017, revealing that it takes a village of men to raise a superstar, female or male. The winners of record, album and song of the year – three of the four most coveted Grammy awards – typically come on stage to collect their trophy alone.

In reality, however, they share their award with numerous producers, engineers and mixers, who are overwhelmingly male. So music icons like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift collecting their individual awards masks the male dominated structures behind these wins. For example, Bad Bunny, this year’s album of the year winner, has received it alongside 12 male producers, songwriters and technicians who were not on stage with him.

Despite women’s consistently high visibility at the Recording Academy nominee announcements and broadcasts over the year, their recognition across the Grammys has remained peripheral compared to men’s. Since 2017, 76% of nominations and wins across all categories have been awarded to men. By contrast, women have been nominated for and won only one in five Grammys in the same period.

Research consistently shows that the reasons women remain marginalised in the Grammys and in music more generally, are deeply structural and multifaceted.

Although the Recording Academy’s mission is to advance a strong culture of diversity, inclusion, belonging and respect in the music industry, women remain marginalised as Recording Academy members. The proportion of Grammy voting members who are women has grown from 21% (2018) to 28% (2024). But this growth rate will only deliver gender parity in 2051.

This slow growth is likely linked to 69% of voting members being songwriters, composers, producers and engineers, roles in which women’s marginalisation has repeatedly been reported to be highest. For example, the latest Inclusion In the Recording Studio report from from USC Annenberg Initiative revealed the overall ratio of men to women songwriters in Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts across 13 years is 6.2 to 1.

Our assessment of 67 academic papers and reports in our report, The Missing Voices of Women in Music and Music News, revealed that gender discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual violence consistently hinder women’s success in music, as do pay gaps, women’s cultural exclusion from the “boys club” and limited discovery and promotional opportunities. According to Be The Change: Gender equity in music, a 2024 report from consultancy Midia based on research conducted across 133 countries 60% of women in the music industry have experienced sexual harassment while one in five women have survived sexual assault.

The evidence points to a reality in which no matter women’s talent or determination to succeed, they will only be able to do so if the music industry changes. Until then, we are unlikely to see women achieving recognition parity at the Grammys or any other music awards.

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Luba Kassova, PhD Candidate, Researcher and Journalist, University of Westminster

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

Instagram is one of Australia’s most popular social media platforms. Almost two in three Aussies have an account.

Ushering in 2026 and what he calls “synthetic everything” on our feeds, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has signalled the platform will likely adjust its algorithms to surface more original content instead of AI slop.

Finding ways to tackle widespread AI content is the latest in a long series of shifts Instagram has undergone over the past decade. Some are obvious and others are more subtle. But all affect user experience and behaviour, and, more broadly, how we see and understand the online social world.

To identify some of these patterns, I examined ten years’ worth of Instagram posts from a single account (@australianassociatedpress) for an upcoming study.

This involved looking at nearly 2,000 posts and more than 5,000 media assets. I selected the AAP account as an example of a noteworthy Australian account with public service value.

I found six key shifts over this timeframe. Although user practices vary, this analysis provides a glimpse into some larger ways the AAP account – and social media more broadly – has been changing in the past decade.

Reflecting on some of these changes also provides hints at how social media might change in the future, and what that means for society.

1. Media orientations have shifted

When it launched in 2010, Instagram quickly became known as the platform that re-popularised the square image format. Square photography has been around for more than 100 years but its popularity waned in the 1980s when newer cameras made the non-square rectangular format dominant.

Instagram forced users to post square images for the platform’s first five years. However, the balance between square and horizontal images has given way to vertical media over time.

On the AAP account that shift happened over the last two years, with 84.4% of all its posts now in vertical orientation.

2. Media types have changed

As with orientations, the media types being posted have also changed. This is due, in part, to platform affordances: what the platform allows or enables a user to do.

As an example, Instagram didn’t allow users to post videos until 2013, three years after the platform started. It added the option to post “stories” (short-lived image/video posts of up to 15 seconds) and live broadcasts in 2016. Reels (longer-lasting videos of up to 90 seconds) came later in 2020.

Some accounts are more video-heavy than others, to try to compete with other video-heavy platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. But we can see a larger trend in the shift from single-image posts to multi-asset posts. Instagram calls these “carousels”, a feature introduced in 2017.

The AAP went from publishing just single-image posts in the first years of the account to gradually using more carousels. In the most recent year, they accounted for 85.9% of all posts.

3. Media are becoming more multimodal

A typical Instagram account grid from the mid-2000s had a mix of carefully curated photographs that were clean, colourful and simple in composition.

Fast-forward a decade, and posts have become much more multimodal. Text is being overlaid on images and videos and the compositions are mixing media types more frequently.

There are subtitles on videos, labels on photos, quote cards, and “headline” posts that try to tell a mini story on the post itself without the user having to read the accompanying post description.

On the AAP account, the proportion of text on posts never rose above 10% between 2015 and 2024. Then, in 2025, it skyrocketed to being on 84.4% of its posts.

4. User practices change

Over time, user practices have also changed in response to cultural trends and changes of the platform design itself.

An example of this is social media accounts starting to insert hashtags in a post comment rather than directly in the post description. This is supposed to help the post’s algorithmic ranking.

Another key change over this timeframe was Instagram’s decision in 2019 to hide “likes” on posts. The thinking behind this decision was to try to reduce the pressure on account owners to make content that was driven by the number of “like” interactions a post received. It was also hypothesised to help with users’ mental health.

In 2021, Instagram left it up to users to decide whether to show or hide “likes” on their account’s posts.

5. The platform became more commercialised

Instagram introduced a Shop tab in 2020 – users could now buy things without leaving the app.

The number of ads, sponsored posts, and suggested accounts has increased over time. Looking through your own feed, you might find that one-third to one-half of the content you now encounter was paid for.

6. The user experience shifts with algorithms and AI

Instagram introduced its “ranked feed” back in 2016. This meant that rather than seeing content in reverse chronological order, users would see content that an algorithm thought users would be interested in. These algorithms consider aspects such as account owner behaviour (view time, “likes”, comments) and what other users find engaging.

An option to opt back in to a reverse chronological feed was then introduced in 2022.

To compete with apps such as Snapchat, Instagram introduced augmented reality effects on the platform in 2017.

It also introduced AI-powered search in 2023, and has experimented with AI-powered profiles and other features. One of these is turning the content of a direct message into an AI image.

Looking ahead

Overall, we see more convergence and homogenisation.

Social media platforms are looking more similar as they seek to replicate the features of competitors. Media formats are looking more similar as the design of smartphones and software favour vertical media. Compositions are looking more multimodal as type, audio, still imagery, and video are increasingly mixed.

And, with the corresponding rise of AI-generated content, users’ hunger for authenticity might grow even more.

T.J. Thomson, Associate Professor of Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

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

How far back does the rich history of Italian olives and oil stretch? My new research, synthesising and reevaluating existing archaeological evidence, suggests olive trees have been exploited for more than 6,000 years. The first Italian olive oil was produced perhaps 4,000 years ago.

The olive was central to ancient life in Italy. Wild and domesticated olives provided edible fruit. By the mid-first millennium BCE into the Roman period, olive oil was used in cooking, medicine, ritual and hygiene.

Table olives are rich in calories, lipids, vitamins and minerals, and high in calcium. Olive wood is dense, and was used in crafting, construction and for fuel. The waste from pressing olives (pomace) was also a remarkably popular domestic and industrial fuel source in antiquity, burning at a higher temperature for longer and with less smoke than charcoal.

Uses of the olive tree and its fruit were diverse.

During the early Roman Empire (around the first century CE) it is possible Rome’s immediate hinterland produced 9.7 million litres of olive oil per year.

Today, Italy remains among the top olive producing regions in the Mediterranean.

A deep history of olive exploitation

Evidence from ancient pollen shows that olive trees were present in Italy during the Pleistocene, more than 11,000 years ago. These were likely wild olives.

In order to think about exploitation and cultivation, it is important to discern human interaction with the plant and its fruit.

Olive tree charcoal, suggestive of human exploitation, has been found in Mesolithic layers from the seventh and sixth millennia BCE (8,000 years ago) in Sicily and Apulia in the south of Italy.

In northern Italy, the Arene Candide cave in Liguria revealed olive charcoal along with quern stones and sickle blades, possibly used for rudimentary olive harvesting and processing. People at this time began to shape the landscape of wild olive trees by using wood for fuel, collecting wild fruit or pruning off branches for fodder.

An exponential increase in evidence occurs in the Neolithic (6000–3500 BCE), hinting at more intensive use of the olive tree.

But our earliest olive stones, which provide more convincing evidence of olive fruit consumption, are not found in an occupation context until the Middle Neolithic (around 5000–4000 BCE). Much of this early material comes from Calabria, Apulia and Sardinia, with only limited glimpses in central Italy and the Veneto.

Despite accumulating evidence, no conclusive signs yet exist for the Neolithic production of olive oil in Italy.

The earliest olive oil in Italy?

Organic residue analysis has detected plant oils, perhaps from olives, in an Early Bronze Age (2000 BCE) large clay storage jar (pithos) from Castelluccio, Sicily. But there remain challenges in our ability to discern between different types of oils using this technique, and preservation in the Mediterranean is rarely ideal.

More potential indicators for olive oil have been found in ceramic storage jars from Broglio di Trebisacce, Calabria, and Roca Vecchia, Apulia, in the mid-second millennium BCE.

The Bronze Age also saw olive cultivation expand into marginal lands where the wild olive did not grow, for example at Tufariello, Campania, around 1700 BCE. There was clearly significant interest in the exploitation of olives in Bronze Age Italy, which likely included the production of oil at least on a small scale.

Iron Age developments

Italian regions experienced different trajectories around 1000 BCE. Parts of southern Italy show declines in olive cultivation, perhaps linked to changing economic and cultural events. Sites on the Ionian and Adriatic coast maintain olive charcoal, stones, oil residues and even imprints of olive leaves on ceramics.

Possibly the earliest stone rotary olive millstone in the Mediterranean was discovered at Incoronata, Basilicata, dating to the seventh century BCE.

The invention of rotary mills signalled an important change in processing power and efficiency. Mills crushed olives, separating skin from flesh before they were pressed for oil. Although they are generally thought to originate in the Aegean, where examples from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE exist, the find from Incoronata might instead suggest a central Mediterranean origin.

Recent research demonstrates external cultures, like Phoenicians or Greeks, were not solely responsible for the introduction of olive cultivation or oil production. This follows similar conclusions reached for viticulture and winemaking in Italy.

Cultural exchange through trade and colonisation brought different knowledge, technology and ideas of production around oleiculture and oil production, creating forums for local innovation.

These forces energised already-intensifying cultivation. By around 600–500 BCE, Etruscan communities began to play a key role in the systematic establishment of groves and the use of olives in central Italy.

Roman consolidation and scaling up

The Roman period saw olive cultivation pushed well past its natural bioclimatic limits. Olive trees were grown at higher altitudes, latitudes and in more arid regions.

Production occurred across much of the Italian peninsula, even in subalpine regions and marginal lands.

Archaeological and ancient environmental material illustrate a substantial oil-producing habit and emerging market in Roman Republican and Imperial Italy – perhaps on a larger scale than previously thought.

Some oil production facilities may have had four or more presses. This illustrates exceptional processing scale, such as the elite villa of Vacone in central Italy.

A facility in Apulia, used from the first century BCE onwards, had an oil cellar with perhaps 47 enormous clay jars (dolia), potentially storing 25,000–35,000 litres.

Oil production also occurred at a smaller-scale in urban centres and isolated rural locations. The discovery of a production site at Case Nuove, Tuscany, provides a rare glimpse into modest scale olive processing using rudimentary technologies.

As analytical and scientific techniques improve, the ancient history of olive oil in Italy will continue to evolve, pushing our knowledge further back in time and adding new detail and nuance.

Emlyn Dodd, Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies, Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London; Macquarie University

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

This year’s Winter Olympics will be held in northern Italy, starting on Friday.

They will be the most spread out in history: the two main competition sites – Milan and the winter resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo – are more than 400 kilometres apart.

Some 3500 athletes from 93 countries will compete in 16 sports for 245 gold medals.

What’s happening at the 2026 games?

Events are organised into broad categories, including ice sports (such as figure skating and curling), skiing and snowboarding (including moguls and halfpipe), Nordic events (such as cross-country and ski jumping) and sliding events (including skeleton and luge).

For the Milan Cortina games, the program has added eight new events designed to increase variety and gender parity.

The most significant addition is the sport of ski mountaineering, often referred to as “skimo”.

The sport requires competitors to ski uphill, transition to walking up steep climbs and then descend on skis.

The program will be the most gender-balanced winter games to date, with 47% women participation mainly thanks to the introduction of women’s double luge and a women’s large hill event in ski jumping.

While the Winter Olympics have been held in 21 cities in 13 different countries, climate change may limit the number of future host locations.

How the Winter Olympics began

The first Winter Olympics were held in Chamonix, France in 1924.

Current events such as figure skating and ice hockey were actually included in the Summer Olympics in 1908 and 1920.

Following the success of these events, and support from the father of the modern Olympics Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to hold a separate winter competition in 1924.

This competition was known as the “Winter Sports Week of the 8th Olympiad” and was retroactively recognised as the first Winter Olympics in 1926.

Many of the early Winter Olympics were held in the same year as the summer games – and in the same country.

While the Summer and Winter Olympics have not been held in the some country since 1936, they were held in the same year until 1992.

The IOC then altered their schedule so the summer and winter games were held on alternating even-numbered years.

IOC officials hoped this change would increase the importance of the winter games, which had been regarded as less important than the summer event.

This decision meant the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, were held only two years after the 1992 winter games in Albertville, France.

The next Olympics were the 1996 Summer Olympics, then the 1998 Winter Olympics.

This alternating format continues to this day.

Australia at the Winter Olympics

Australia’s first winter Olympian was speed skater Ken Kennedy in 1936.

Since then, Australia has competed in every Winter Olympics and its team has grown from one athlete in 1936 to more than 50 in recent games.

Speed skater Colin Coates has represented Australia at the most winter games: six times between 1968 and 1988.

It took 58 years for Australia to claim its first Winter Olympic medal in 1994. Steven Bradbury, Richard Nizielski, Andrew Murtha and Kieran Hansen won bronze in the 5,000m short track speed skating relay.

Bradbury also famously won Australia’s first Winter Olympic gold medal in the 1,000m speed skating in 2002.

Australia has won 19 Winter Olympic medals, including six gold.

It has achieved most success in freestyle skiing events such as aerials and mogul, led by multiple medal winners Alisa Camplin and Lydia Lassila.

Australia’s medal chances in 2026

Australia heads into these games with realistic medal chances in a small number of sports where it has consistently punched above its weight. This may seem surprising for a country better known for beaches than snow but targeted investment and athlete pathways have paid off.

Australia’s strongest gold medal hope is in freestyle skiing moguls, a fast downhill event where athletes ski over steep bumps while performing two jumps.

Jakara Anthony, who won gold in Beijing in 2022, has dominated international competitions since then, regularly winning World Cup events – the highest level of competition outside the Olympics.

Aerial skiing has also emerged as a genuine medal opportunity for Australia.

Laura Peel has continued her strong international form with recent World Cup gold, while Danielle Scott has also topped the podium this season.

With two athletes consistently winning at the highest level outside the Olympics, Australia is a genuine podium contender in this discipline.

Snowboarding also offers strong chances.

In snowboard halfpipe, riders launch out of a giant ice channel and perform aerial tricks while being judged on height, difficulty and style. Scotty James has been among the world’s best for almost a decade and has won multiple World Championship medals.

Australia is also building serious depth through younger athletes such as Valentino Guseli, who has already claimed World Cup gold and is emerging as a genuine podium contender.

In women’s monobob, Bree Walker’s recent World Cup gold shows Australia is now a genuine contender in one of the games’ newer disciplines.

In skeleton, where athletes race head-first down an icy track at speeds exceeding 120 kilometres per hour, Jaclyn Narracott won silver in 2022 – Australia’s first sliding sport medal. Another podium finish is possible for her.

Beyond these core medal prospects, sports such as short track speed skating could also feature in Australia’s medal mix if athletes peak at the right time, with potential for 2026 to rival Australia’s most successful Winter Olympics to date.

Vaughan Cruickshank, Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania; Brendon Hyndman, Associate Professor of Education and Associate Dean (Academic), Faculty of Arts and Education, Charles Sturt University, and Tom Hartley, Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania

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

It’s 1917 and policewoman Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks is patrolling the parks of Adelaide, armed with a five-foot cane. She’s there to protect women from harm by enforcing a “three foot rule” to keep amorous couples at a safe distance from each other.

When not on morality police duties, she likes to shop in the recently opened Moore’s department store on Victoria Square, with its grand marble staircase, and its piano serenading the well-heeled clientele with cheery wartime songs.

This might seem like a fanciful premise for a historical crime fiction series. But Miss Kate Cocks, as she was usually known, did in fact exist. (So did Moore’s department store, before it was gutted by fire in 1948.) Cocks was the first woman police officer in the British Empire to be paid at the same rate as her male colleagues and granted similar powers of arrest.

In fact, she was the first policewoman in South Australia, which in 1894 became the first state to grant women the vote and the right to stand for parliament. (A year after New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.)

Review: The Death of Dora Black; Murder on North Terrace – by Lainie Anderson (Hachette)

Journalist and novelist Lainie Anderson discovered Cocks while randomly scrolling through her Twitter feed during the COVID pandemic. She then applied to the University of South Australia to do a PhD on Miss Cocks, aiming to make her the protagonist in a popular crime novel. This resulted in a two-book deal.

Anderson’s (still embargoed) thesis addressed the challenge, and ethics, of turning a real woman into a fictionalised character. Whatever her concerns might have been, The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace are fine additions to feminist historical crime fiction: perhaps best exemplified by the Miss Phryne Fisher mysteries written by the late Kerry Greenwood.

Indeed, Miss Cock’s fictional offsider, the indomitable Constable Ethel Bromley, is somewhat reminiscent of Phryne. Ethel is also wealthy and beautiful. She, too, entertains a lover and practices birth control. As one of Ethel’s aunts admiringly tells her: “You are our future selves”.

It’s a clever ploy, placing the “paradoxical” real-life character of Miss Cocks, with her reverence for motherhood and perplexing opposition to birth control and abortion, in a close working relationship with a character who embraces views much more in keeping with contemporary beliefs about women’s rights. This juxtaposition effectively stages a dialogue between past and present attitudes.

“In my opinion, a mother is the nearest thing to God upon this earth, because she, too, creates,” Cocks – who, in real life, founded a refuge for babies after her retirement – told The Advertiser in 1936. “That is why I am so opposed to all the abortive practices nowadays.”

But importantly, what Kate and Ethel share is their desire to protect women.

Revealing fashion and complex characters

While women may have achieved more control over their bodies since 1917, both The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace deal with crimes involving rape and domestic violence. Sadly, the persistence of these crimes today suggests the times may not have changed as much as we might hope.

The Death of Dora Black begins with the discovery of a young woman’s body under the jetty at Glenelg beach. The only clues are two small vials of opium and an expensive art nouveau purse. This is the motivating crime that will drive the primary narrative. However, it’s the incidental characters and descriptions of Adelaide that give these books their depth and heft.

Then, we are introduced to Miss Cocks as she shops in Moore’s department store for a pair of new shoes exactly the same as her old ones, but in a different colour. At five foot six inches, Miss Cocks is taller than the average woman of the time, and as “neat as a pin” in a “light green, ankle-length silk frock with an understated ruffle at the throat and a fitted waist”. Anderson’s fashion notes are precise – and revelatory in terms of what they might tell us about the characters.

Miss Cocks appears to be a 41-year-old, straight-laced, buttoned-up spinster. However, she is also a product of both her time and social circumstances – and all the more complex for that.

Ethel, on the other hand, is 27, exuberant and prone to wearing military-inspired outfits with much higher hemlines. She has also been learning jujitsu to great effect, having flattened a “mountain of a man” at the Port Adelaide docks who was pestering her. She would like to be a detective.

Over the course of the two books, set in January and September of 1917, respectively, Miss Cocks and Ethel’s working relationship deepens. As we are told in the second book, they develop “an unspoken appreciation of one another’s strengths and a sympathetic acceptance of their weaknesses” through their shared experiences, and the challenges they face together.

Murder ‘a welcome distraction’

The two female police officers are required to work an overwhelming 60 hours a week, with one Sunday off in every six. For the most part, this work is routine and exhausting. It involves daily trips to the Adelaide Railway Station to meet unaccompanied, vulnerable young women and ensure their future safety; walking the city’s parklands to catch couples in flagrante; and patrolling the suburbs to monitor domestic disputes. The murders they become involved in are something of a welcome distraction.

In Murder on North Terrace, this involves the death of the South Australian Art Gallery’s head in front of a controversial painting he has championed. Miss Cocks, meanwhile, is facing domestic crime of a different order involving a man who locks his wife in a truck every night to prevent her entering the house.

Anderson skilfully blends truth and fiction. The controversial painting, Sowing New Seed by William Orpen, did indeed exist. It caused quite a stir at the time, as did the case of the wife padlocked in the truck. Only the murder in the gallery is a fiction.

Real – and ever present – is the backdrop of the first world war. (This is also the backdrop of Anderson’s debut novel, Long Flight Home, also based on historical research and real people.) From the pianist in Moore’s department store playing Pack Up Your Troubles on repeat, to the returned soldiers in Victoria Square, “broken men with missing limbs and lost hope”, the impact of the war on the inhabitants of Adelaide is a constant theme.

In Murder on North Terrace, the war moves centre stage. Miss Cocks and Ethel are now on duty at the Cheer-Up Hut in Elder Park, a home away from home for new recruits and 300 recently returned South Australian soldiers.

As they watch a young amputee threaten to throw himself off a balcony and into the arms of a young woman he has just met, they are once again presented with forces beyond their control: including love, lust and the notorious six o’clock swill – not to mention a predatory rapist.

At least Ethel gets to play the detective, if only briefly. She also receives a marriage proposal – which completely confounds her, since this would mean resigning from the job she loves. Ethel may be a fictional character, but there’s a hard truth here. My own mother experienced it in 1937, when she was forced to give up her job in the United Kingdom as a result of a similar marriage bar.

Given the ongoing dialogue between fact and fiction, if I have any criticism to make of The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace, it is that they should have come with a map of Adelaide in 1917. I keenly wanted to trace Miss Cocks and Ethel’s movements through the city as they went about their business of saving women and solving crime.

Publishers take note: there’s the opportunity for a crime walk here. There, readers might investigate for themselves the relationship between the real and the imaginary that Anderson so effectively blurs. At the same time, she gives us a compelling portrait of what life might have felt like in Adelaide at that time.

Such is the power of good crime fiction that touches the heart as well as the mind – while inspiring a desire to play history detective.

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.

The Australian government has finalised a A$220 billion hospital funding deal with the states and territories.

A key part of the negotiation was $2 billion designed to help hospitals move more than 3,000 patients stranded in hospital waiting for discharge to a more appropriate aged-care facility.

However this wasn’t included in the final agreement. Instead, the states will need to dip into their overall funding allocation to pay for any changes.

Being stuck in hospital is not good for older people or their families. Stranded older people are at risk of getting an infection in hospital. Their families are under pressure to find and agree to long-term support.

It’s also bad for hospitals, which end up allocating scarce resources to patients who could be much more efficiently looked after in a residential care facility or with home support.

This results in unhappy patients and families, much higher health-care costs, and longer waits for others who need hospital care.

So how did we get into this situation? And what might happen next?

Why are patients stranded?

Most older people waiting for discharge need a pathway to rehabilitation and ongoing support. That includes transition care to facilities such as rehabilitation centres or units and ongoing support at home, or residential care.

About 60% of older patients discharged from hospital through transition care go home; the remainder need residential care.

Discharge is more likely to be delayed when this transition care is unavailable or poorly planned, and there is a shortage of home and residential care.

The broader problem is the disconnect between the Commonwealth-run aged care and disability programs and the state and territory-run public hospital system.

Rising demand and long waits

Demand for aged care is increasing dramatically as more people reach older age. The proportion of population aged 65 and over has increased from 14.7% to 17.3% over the past decade and it is projected to increase to 19.3% over the next.

At any one time, about one-quarter of those aged 65 and over use either home care or residential care.

But the supply of support at home and residential care has not kept up with growing demand. Despite the introduction of a new aged care system in November last year, unacceptably long waiting times for aged care support at home and residential care persist.

In 2024-25, the average waiting time for a home care package for eligible older people was a staggering 245 days, double what it was a year earlier.

The wait for residential care was little better. On average older people eligible for residential care waited for 162 days.

Shifting costs to patients

The Commonwealth is determined to reign in the cost of its long-term care programs for older people and people with disabilities.

Government has been unwilling to consider levies, taxes and insurance models to underwrite the costs of aged care.

Instead, it has introduced a user-pays model. So at the same time as waiting times have increased, out-of-pocket costs have risen.

With the new aged care model introduced last November, for residential care:

• the maximum cost of buying or renting a place has increased by nearly 40%

• the lifetime cap on out-of-pocket costs has increased by about 60%

• part-pensioners and self funded retirees must now pay a new “hotelling” contribution

• providers are increasingly charging optional extra service fees.

For the new Support at Home program, all new users, including full pensioners, will now pay mandatory out-of-pocket contributions for everyday services such as cleaning, laundry and gardening, and independent living support including showering and toileting.

The cost of these services has also gone up. Most providers are now charging around A$100 per hour for cleaning services.

It’s not as simple as just ‘adding more beds’

The Commonwealth has put its faith in a highly centralised and quasi-market model to manage the system.

Effectively, the Commonwealth funds and regulates aged care from Canberra, and lets the local market of providers and consumers sort out the price of services and where they are provided. The Commonwealth has no direct involvement in their planning or management.

The result is a postcode lottery of fragmented home and residential care providers. These are difficult to navigate and have little connection to hospital services.

About a quarter of the 700 residential care providers report they are breaking even or making a loss. Their return-on-investment isn’t sufficient to encourage enough capital investment to address the shortfall of 10,000 aged care beds per year.

Meanwhile, cost pressures are driving increasingly larger “big box” corporatised institutional facilities to maximise their profits.

Without either a low-cost capital investment fund from the government or higher returns on investment, providers will be unwilling to take the risk of investing in new beds to meet the shortfall.

The Commonwealth is betting that increased charges for residential aged care users will improve the return on investment and encourage new building.

Home-care providers are also feeling squeezed

Similarly, around 25% of support at home providers report breaking even or losing money and putting up their hourly rates to make ends meet.

For the increasing number of self-funded retirees, these costs are high and may discourage them from using home care when they need it.

What might happen next?

It’s unclear the new user-pays model will deliver the necessary uplift in return on investment to increase the supply of aged care services in the near future.

If it doesn’t, some of the hospital agreement funding will need to be used to increase the supply of residential and home care.

Western Australia is already taking action to encourage more investment in residential care. Whether others do so remains to be seen.

The states may also invest funds in their own transition care, hospital-in-the home and rehabilitation facilities to ease pressure on hospitals.

Hal Swerissen, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, La Trobe University

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

The start of 2026 has seen gold and silver surge to record highs – only to crash on Friday.

Gold prices peaked above US$5,500 (A$7,900) per ounce for the first time on Thursday, well above previous highs. But by the end of Friday, it had dropped to around US$5068 (A$7,282).

Silver had been making gains even faster than gold. It hit more than US$120 (A$172) per ounce last week, marking one of its strongest runs in decades, before crashing on Friday to US$98.50 (A$141.50).

So what’s behind those surges and falls? And what should everyday investors know about the risks of investing in precious metals right now?

Why gold has been hitting new highs

Gold is the classic safe haven: an asset people buy to protect their savings when worried about financial risks.

With international political tensions rising, trade war threats, shifting signals about where interest rates are heading and a potential changing world order, investors are seeking assets that feel stable when everything else looks shaky.

Friday’s crash in gold and silver was sparked by financial markets reacting to early news of Donald Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as chair of the US Federal Reserve. The US central bank plays a key role in global financial stability.

Central banks around the world have been buying gold at a rapid pace, reinforcing its reputation as a place to park value during periods of uncertainty.

But it’s not just big institutions moving the market. In Australia and overseas, retail investors – individuals buying and selling smaller amounts for themselves – have played a part too.

Those individuals have been increasingly treating gold, silver and other precious metals as a hedge against so much uncertainty, as well as a momentum play – trying to buy in to keep up with others.

As prices have trended upward, more everyday investors have bought in, especially through gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which make it simple to gain exposure without storing physical gold bullion.

What’s been driving silver’s surge

While gold was grabbing headlines for much of 2025, silver has been the real showstopper. Before Friday’s fall, the metal had surged more than 60% in just the past month, far outpacing gold’s still impressive run of around 30%.

Unlike gold, silver has a split personality. Industrial uses are driving up demand for silver. It’s critical for clean energy technologies including solar panels, electric vehicles (EVs), and semiconductors.

This dual appeal – as a safe haven, but also as an in-demand industrial commodity – is drawing investors who see multiple reasons for prices to keep climbing.

Every solar panel contains about 20 grams of silver. The solar industry consumes nearly 30% of total global demand for silver.

EVs also use 25–50 grams each, and AI data centres need silver for semiconductors.

The kicker? The silver market has run a supply deficit for five consecutive years. We’re consuming more than we’re mining, and most silver comes as a byproduct of other metals. You can’t simply open more silver mines.

Individual buyers have piled into silver

One of Australia’s most popular online investment platforms for retail investors is CommSec, with around 3 million customers.

Bloomberg tracking of CommSec trades shows how much retail purchases of silver ETFs in particular have spiked higher in the past year.

Over the past year, gold ETF trades on CommSec grew 47%, with cumulative net buying reaching A$158 million. That reflects gold’s established role in portfolios.

Yet despite attracting slightly lower total investment overall at A$104 million, silver trading activity exploded by far more: it’s been 1,000% higher than the year before.

This means retail investors made far more frequent, smaller trades in silver. This is classic momentum-chasing behaviour, as everyday investors piled into an asset showing dramatic price gains.

The pattern is unmistakable: while gold remains the anchor, silver has become the speculative play.

Its lower per-ounce price, industrial demand narrative, and social media buzz make it particularly accessible to retail investors seeking exposure to the precious metals rally, at a much lower price than gold.

The risks every investor needs to know

The data shows Australian retail investors have been buying as prices rise. But this “fear of missing out” approach comes with serious risks.

Volatility cuts both ways. From February 2025 to just before Friday’s sharp drop, the price of silver had surged 269%. But even before that fall, silver’s spectacular gain had come with 36% “annualised volatility” (which measures how much a stock price varies over one year). That was nearly double gold’s 20% volatility over the same period.

What does that mean in practice? As we’ve just seen, what goes up fast can come down quickly too.

Buying high is dangerous. When retail investors pile in after major price increases, they often end up buying near the top. Professional investors and central banks have been accumulating gold and silver for years, at much lower prices.

No income, higher risk. Unlike shares or bonds, metals don’t pay dividends or interest. Your entire return depends on prices rising further from already elevated levels. And as the past few days have shown, the potential for sharp drawdowns is substantial.

Keep it modest. Financial advisers typically recommend precious metals comprise 5–15% of a diversified portfolio. After such extraordinary price volatility, that guideline matters more than ever.

Disclaimer: This article provides general information only and is not intended as financial advice. All investments carry risk.

Angel Zhong, Professor of Finance, RMIT University and Jason Tian, Senior Lecturer, Swinburne University of Technology

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

Australia is battling its biggest rise in whooping cough cases in 35 years.

During 2024 and 2025 Australia recorded 82,513 whooping cough cases – the highest number since monitoring began in 1991.

Also known as pertussis or the “100-day cough”, whooping cough is a potentially fatal respiratory illness which causes severe coughing episodes.

It spreads from one person to another and is particularly deadly among infants.

So why the surge? And how can you protect yourself and your loved ones?

What is whooping cough?

Whooping cough is a respiratory infection caused by the bacteria Bordetella pertussis.

Transmission occurs through close contact with infected people such as via coughing and sneezing.

Early symptoms include runny nose or sore throat. This is called the “catarrhal phase” and can look similar to a common cold.

A persistent cough comes next, and typically lasts between six and ten weeks.

This leads to intense bouts of coughing, with babies and children often making high-pitched “whoop” sounds when they breath in. This is where the term “whooping cough” comes from.

Whooping cough can be very severe in newborn babies and infants. About one in 125 babies with whooping cough aged below six months dies from pneumonia or brain damage.

Household contacts and carers often pass the illness onto infants, with parents the source of infection in more than 50% of cases. Infants can also pick up an infection from siblings and health-care workers.

Complications in older children and adults include interrupted sleep and pneumonia, a lung infection which can require hospitalisation. Patients can even sustain rib fractures from coughing so hard.

Antibiotics, when given early, can stop disease progression.

However after the cough is established, which is when most people realise they are infected, antibiotics have little effect on the disease’s progression.

But, there’s a vaccine for it?

Yes. The whooping cough vaccine is given as a combination vaccine with diphtheria and tetanus.

In Australia, this vaccine is part of routine infant and childhood immunisation schedules. A booster dose is also given to Year 7 students.

Pregnant women are advised to vaccinate every pregnancy to boost the production and transfer of antibodies to their unborn baby. This also helps protect infants who are too young to be immunised.

A 2025 study from Denmark found vaccination during pregnancy to be 72% effective against laboratory confirmed whooping cough.

Although infants are most vulnerable to whooping cough, it can cause infection across all ages and put a large strain on the health-care system, especially for adults aged over 50.

To protect themselves and limit spread of the disease, adults should get vaccinated every ten years.

Australia’s national vaccine regulator checks the safety of whooping cough vaccines each year. Ongoing monitoring over many years shows these vaccines are safe and continue to protect people of all ages.

But low immunisation rates among children and adolescents remain a concern, with new data showing Australia’s 2024-25 childhood immunisation rate was the lowest in a decade.

Only about one-fifth of adults 50 years and older are up to date with the whooping cough vaccine. This means they have had a booster within the last ten years.

Why are there so many cases right now?

Whooping cough is a challenging disease to control because immunity, acquired through immunisation or natural infection, wanes over time. This gives rise to whooping cough epidemics every two to three years.

Whooping cough is most commonly diagnosed using PCR testing of a throat swab. This usually involves visiting a GP to get the swab sent to a lab, and then waiting for the results. This method has been routinely used since the early 2000s.

In 2024, 57,257 whooping cough cases were detected in Australia. This included a case where a child with an antibiotic-resistant infection required intensive care support.

This represents the highest notification rate since records began in 1991. And it reflects a true increase in the prevalence, as well as awareness and testing, of whooping cough.

The 2024 surge in cases was likely due, at least in part, to COVID public health restrictions which disrupted the usual epidemic cycle.

During this time, many children didn’t get the normal immune “boost” after being vaccinated and exposed to the bacteria. This left them more vulnerable to infection, particularly when authorities lifted social distancing restrictions.

Whooping cough was also widespread in 2025 with 25,256 cases reported that year. All age groups were affected, but notification rates were highest among school-aged and preschool-aged children.

Unfortunately, whooping cough isn’t going away anytime soon. However, timely vaccination across all ages is vital to curb its spread and protect vulnerable populations. 

Archana Koirala, Paediatrician and Infectious Diseases Specialist; Clinical Researcher, University of Sydney

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

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has lifted the cash rate by 25 basis points to 3.85%, adding to pressure on households and businesses. While the move was widely expected by markets and most economists, the Reserve Bank says inflation risks remain too high to be comfortable.

The RBA said inflation “picked up materially” in the second half of 2025. Governor Michele Bullock told a press conference:

Based on the data we have seen and the conditions here and around the world, the board now thinks it will take longer for inflation to return to target and this is not an acceptable outcome.

The rate rise reflects concern that inflation will not return to the RBA’s 2–3% target range until June 2027, according to the bank’s updated forecasts also released today.

Stronger than expected economic growth means capacity pressures are rising and keeping inflation higher than expected. Progress could stall unless interest rates are pushed a little higher.

It was the first rate increase since November 2023, and followed three cuts in 2025 when inflation was cooling.

Policy set for a year ahead

In the lead-up to the meeting, there appeared to be a gap between market expectations and the RBA’s own comments. Markets and many economists focused on the latest inflation data, which showed a renewed uptick, particularly in prices for services. That data strengthened the case for a rate rise at this meeting.

The RBA, however, has repeatedly emphasised it does not set policy based on short-term movements in inflation.

That message has been reflected in recent meeting minutes and reinforced in a January ABC interview with Andrew Hauser, the RBA’s deputy governor. He said interest rate decisions are guided by where inflation is expected to be in about a year’s time – not where it has been over the past quarter or two.

Today’s decision suggests that, on that forward-looking view, the RBA became less comfortable with the inflation outlook. Rather than a temporary overshoot, the path back to the 2-3% inflation target will take longer than previously thought.

What’s driving inflation?

The latest consumer price index (CPI) figures help explain the Reserve Bank’s caution. Trimmed mean inflation – the RBA’s preferred underlying measure – was 3.3% in the year to December, up from 3.2% in the year to November. That puts underlying inflation clearly above the target range.

More importantly, recent inflation pressures have been led by services prices. Costs related to rents, insurance, health and education have continued to rise, reflecting domestic pressures such as wages and business operating costs.

In its statement, the RBA pointed to stronger demand and ongoing capacity constraints as key concerns:

Private demand is growing more quickly than expected, capacity pressures are greater than previously assessed and labour market conditions are a little tight.

Services inflation tends to fall slowly. Unlike petrol or food prices, it does not usually reverse quickly once it picks up. For the RBA, this persistence increases the risk inflation could remain above target for longer than hoped.

Why the RBA moved now

Faced with these risks, the bank appears to have concluded that waiting would have been the bigger gamble. If inflation stayed above target for too long, or if expectations began to drift higher, the RBA could later be forced into sharper and more disruptive rate rises.

By lifting the cash rate to 3.85% now, the Reserve Bank is trying to stay ahead of the problem. A modest move today may reduce the chance of more aggressive action later.

Australia is out of step

This decision also puts Australia out of step with several other major economies.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates three times in 2025 and is signalling further cuts are likely this year. The European Central Bank has moved even faster, cutting rates eight times between June 2024 and June 2025 to boost growth.

By contrast, Australia’s inflation challenge appears more domestically driven, particularly through persistent services inflation. That helps explain why it is moving in the opposite direction to many of its global peers.

Credibility and what comes next

The quick turnaround after the last rate cut in August may raise questions about the RBA’s earlier judgement. But inflation risks remain tilted to the upside.

The board judged that inflation is likely to remain above target for some time and it was appropriate to increase the cash rate target.

For households and businesses, the message is clear. Borrowing costs and mortgage repayments are rising again.

What happens next will depend largely on whether services inflation begins to cool and whether wage growth shows clearer signs of moderation.

If inflation resumes a steady decline towards the target band, this increase could be a one-off rise. If not, the RBA has signalled it is prepared to do more.

For now, the message from the Reserve Bank is simple: inflation is lower than it was, but still too high for comfort – and interest rates are likely to stay higher for longer until that changes.

Stella Huangfu, Associate Professor, School of Economics, University of Sydney

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

Australia’s corporate regulator has secured refunds of A$40 million to more than 38,000 investors in risky financial products, following a review of the industry.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) raised concerns that marketing of high-risk products known as “contracts for difference” or CFDs, failed to clearly explain the risks involved.

This is just ASIC’s latest intervention in more than 15 years of ongoing concern with the potential harm of CFDs to retail investors.

Fine-tuning the marketing of these complex financial products to a suitable audience remains an unfinished task for the regulator.

What are CFDs?

In its report, ASIC said thousands of Australians lose money trading CFDs every year. In 2023-34, over 133,000 people, or 68% of retail clients, lost more than $458 million.

Contracts for difference are a type of financial instrument known as derivatives because they follow the price of an underlying asset, such as stocks, the Australian dollar, and other financial products.

They are traded “over-the-counter” (meaning not on a public exchange) on platforms run by CFD providers.

Investors can profit from both upward or downward movements in financial assets with CFDs. Unlike buying shares, investors need only pay a fraction of the price (the margin) up front to enter into a CFD to track a financial product, with the hope of making a profit.

CFDs are leveraged products, which means an investor is borrowing money to speculate on the price of an asset. A small price change in the underlying stock or commodity can have an amplified effect by increasing the gain – or the loss – on the CFD.

For example, this can be as little as paying $1 upfront to gain the same trading power as $100.

Let’s say you buy a CFD on one Apple share. As you only need to pay a fifth of the Apple stock for the CFD, you can buy five Apple CFDs for the price of one Apple share. So if the price of Apple rises by $1, you could make $5. But if it falls by $1, you could lose $5 dollars.

CFDs are therefore popular with investors as they can trade many financial instruments (betting on rises or falls) and magnify their trading power.

The downside is that trading on margin also amplifies losses if the market goes against the bet that a price will rise or fall. This has led to financial distress and cases of attempted self-harm.

ASIC has been particularly concerned about issuers offering “margin discounts” to clients on particular trades, to reduce the amount or “margin” that the investor pays up front.

This contravenes ASIC’s 2021 product intervention order. ASIC published a further warning to CFD issuers in 2024 to stop this practice.

The complexity and risk of CFDs has meant they are effectively banned in the United States. In Singapore, prospective traders need to pass a customer knowledge assessment before they are allowed to trade CFDs.

Who are the products being marketed to?

CFDs are not for the faint of heart and would only suit investors who are very knowledgeable and have a large appetite for risk. Despite this, retail investors (regular people) are the dominant market targeted by CFDs issuers in their marketing and advertising.

In ASIC’s recent report, the regulator found that CFD issuer websites misled consumers.

Some examples were promoting the underlying instruments, such as shares or commodities, rather than actual CFDs, and overstating the benefits of trading CFDs and understating the risks.

ASIC has forced 46 issuers to rewrite their websites by removing misleading content and making them clearly state that they are offering CFDs, among other changes. One issuer amended 1,000 web pages.

ASIC chair Joe Longo last week floated the idea of banning advertising for high-risk financial products, which would also include CFDs.

The underlying concern is that unsophisticated investors are being attracted to complex financial products that carry great risk of financial loss.

Indeed, ASIC’s report found that only 32% of retail clients made money from CFDs after fees. Of those that traded the most per month (over 50 trades), only 19% were profitable after fees.

Fears vulnerable investors still slipping through the cracks

The key difference is between retail and wholesale clients.

Wholesale clients are generally institutions or sophisticated investors, highly experienced and more likely to trade complex derivatives and make a profit. Wholesale clients are defined in law based on certain tests.

Wholesale clients also lose some of the consumer protections that apply to retail investors, such as receiving product disclosure statements and having access to dispute resolution.

Yet, ASIC found that even wholesale clients lost money, with only 30% making profits.

This raises concerns for ASIC of whether some retail clients were misclassified as wholesale clients by the CFD issuers.

So, it is not the laws that need changing, which clearly define sophisticated investors. What is needed is more scrutiny of how issuers misclassify potentially vulnerable investors.

The statistics are concerning as this means the large majority of investors are losing money trading CFDs, driven largely by paying fees. On the flip side, this means CFD issuers are profiting from some of these losses as they earn the fees.

This raises questions of whether CFD issuers are attracting suitable clientele through advertising, as the losses by investors seem excessive. This suggests that advertising should carry warning labels, similar to advertising for other risky activities, such as sports betting.

Walking a fine line

CFDs have existed for over two decades, with a market that is predominantly comprised of retail investors.

ASIC has managed the fine balance of permitting their access, while regulating issuers on their marketing and operations without banning them outright. Potential investors would be wise to do their own homework to carefully assess the costs and risks of CFDs before wading into the market.

Adrian Lee, Associate Professor in Property and Real Estate, Deakin University

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

Where kids are born in a family can be important. But it is not just about who gets more grown-up privileges or parental pressure.

Research tells us firstborn children, on average, tend to do better on a range of outcomes. This includes doing better at school and being more likely to be top managers when compared to those born later.

In our new study, we looked at what impact birth order might have on how children spend their time. Both on their own and with their parents.

This revealed differences in terms of screen use and time spent enriching their intellectual development.

Our research

In our study, we used survey data from around 5,500 Australian children aged two to 15. The data comes from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, a nationally representative survey.

This included detailed 24-hour diaries, which recorded how children spent their time from waking up to going to sleep. They specified if activities were done with parents or independently.

We grouped activities into “sleep”, “school time”, “enrichment activities”, “screen time” and “physical activities”.

Enrichment activities are outside of school activities that help intellectual development. For example, reading, homework, playing board games or learning a musical instrument.

We then compared the diaries of firstborn children to later-born children from different families born in the same year, living in the same neighbourhoods, with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. All families had two or three children.

There is no similar data (such as time use records over years) available on siblings within the same family to capture and compare what siblings were doing at the same age.

Other studies looking at different outcomes (such as academic achievement) have shown birth order comparisons within a family are extremely similar to birth order comparisons across different families, once you adjust for family size, as we have done in our study.

So, it is likely our results would be similar to actual sibling comparisons within a family.

Younger kids get more screens

When compared to firstborn children, second- and thirdborn children spend an extra nine and 14 minutes, respectively, per day having screen time.

While this may sound modest, it represents a 7–10% increase compared to the average daily screen time of firstborns. Over the course of a week it is between about one and 1.5 hours.

This extra screen time also comes at the cost of other activities. In particular, later-born children spent 11 to 18 minutes less per day on enrichment activities, an 11–20% reduction compared to older siblings in the study.

We found no consistent differences between older and younger siblings when it came to time spent on other activities, such as school, physical activity or sleep.

Looking across age groups, the effects are generally greater for 10–14-year-old children. This suggests early adolescence is a period where particular attention is needed.

To check whether these patterns extend beyond Australia, we repeated the analysis using time-use diaries from a sample of children in the United States. The results were similar.

Why is this happening?

One common explanation for differences between first and subsequent children is parental time. As families grow, parents have less time and attention to foster subsequent children’s development.

However, this may not be the whole story. Our study showed later-born children did spend less time on enrichment activities with their parents. But about half of the difference comes from later-born children spending less time on enrichment activities on their own.

Screen time shows a similar pattern. The increase among later-born children is largely explained by activities they do alone, rather than with parents or siblings.

So this also reflects differences in children’s own choices or opportunities, not just direct parental involvement. For example, a younger sibling may have more freedom to choose to play video games rather than do their homework.

Of course parenting may still play an important role here. Our study shows later-born children face fewer rules around screen use, such as limits on programs or time, and are less likely to feel their parents expect them to follow rules. This may in part reflect parents’ desire for fairness in allowing similar use of screens for siblings at any given time, rather than at specific ages.

What does this mean?

The differences we find may seem small on any given day.

But they can add up over time. As our 2024 study showed, spending more time on screens and less time on reading, homework or other learning activities can lead to gaps in academic skill development over childhood, as measured by lower NAPLAN test scores.

The increase in solo screen time for later-born children is particularly concerning, because it may expose children to inappropriate content online.

What can we do?

First, recognising later-born children on average spend more time on screens and less time on enrichment activities than firstborns can be helpful for informing parenting strategies.

Second, it shows spending quality time with later-born children, actively encouraging enrichment activities, and keeping consistent rules around screen time all matter.

Finally, this suggests broader policies, such as the social media limits for under 16s, could help equalise opportunities for later-born children to learn and grow.

Danusha Jayawardana, Research Fellow in Health Economics, Monash University; Gawain Heckley, Researcher in Health Economics, Lund University, and Nicole Black, Associate Professor of Health Economics, Monash University

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

Australia’s political parties set new records in funds raised and spent in the lead-up to the 2025 federal election. Now, nine months later, Australians finally get a look at who funded the parties’ election campaigns.

Data released today reveal that big money matters in Australian elections, and political donations remain highly concentrated among a small number of powerful individuals and interest groups.

The big spenders

Money matters in Australian elections because it helps spread political messages far and wide. The Coalition substantially outspent Labor in the year leading up to the 2025 election, declaring $212 million in expenditure compared with Labor’s $160 million. In fact, the two major parties together spent three quarters of a total $489 million in 2024–25. These figures include electoral communication, as well as party operating expenses and salaries, but there is no breakdown.

Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots party came in third, declaring $53 million in expenditure, well below the $123 million and $89 million his United Australia Party spent in the 2022 and 2019 election campaigns, respectively. The Greens declared $40 million and One Nation just $3 million in expenditure in 2024–25.

Australia’s political parties collectively exceeded their 2022 election budgets in 2025, raising $490 million, compared with $402 million in the lead-up to the 2022 election, and coming very close to the half-a-billion mark for the first time.

The Coalition has long led the fundraising “arms race” between the major parties, with Labor taking a substantive lead only once on record – in the lead-up to the 2007 election that saw Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party defeat John Howard’s Coalition government.

The big donors

So who’s stumping up these whopping sums? A few big donors dominate the picture.

Clive Palmer’s Mineralogy – which donated almost exclusively to the Trumpet of Patriots – was by far the largest donor in the 2024–25 financial year. While Palmer’s $54.3 million in donations this electoral cycle is lower than his record-breaking intervention in 2022, it still shows the substantial sway a single donor can have in an election year.

Climate 200 was the second-largest donor over the period, with the organisation making $6.6 million in donations to a range of independent candidates and campaign groups. Donors to Climate 200 – including Scott Farquhar, William Taylor Nominees, and Mike Cannon-Brookes – were among those stumping up the largest individual donations.

One new player this cycle was Coal Australia, a lobby group founded in 2024 to represent coal mining interests. The group made more than $4 million in donations to electoral campaign groups such as Australians for Prosperity, and Jobs for Mining Communities.

The single biggest donation to the Coalition came from philanthropist Pam Wall, who gave $5.2 million to the Liberal Party of South Australia in 2024–25, in memory of her late husband, Ian Wall. Other major donors to the Coalition included the Cormack Foundation (an investment arm for the Liberal Party), Oryxium Investments (linked to the Lowy family), and DoorDash Australia.

Labor’s single biggest donor was Labor Holdings (an investment arm of the party), which donated $4 million, followed by the Mining and Energy Union ($3.3 million). SA Progressive Business, a fundraising arm of the Labor Party, donated $1.4 million.

Anthony Pratt’s paper and packaging company Pratt Holdings made big donations to both Labor and the Coalition, as it has done in previous years, with Labor benefiting to the tune of $2 million, and the Coalition $1 million.

What about the rest of the money?

There’s a lot of hidden money in Australian politics. Declared donations made up only a quarter of political parties’ total income in 2024–25. Public funding made up another quarter, and “other receipts” a further 20%. That leaves about 30% ($144 million) in undisclosed private funds.

The Coalition’s funding is a little more murky: 36% of Coalition income in 2024–25 was undisclosed, compared with 23% for Labor. Only donations bigger than $16,900 need to be declared under the current rules, so substantial donations remain hidden.

Reform is coming, but there’s still more to do

Fortunately, the rules are changing soon to provide much more transparency. From July 1 this year, the donations disclosure threshold will be lowered to $5,000, and donations data will be released much more quickly. Donations will be required to be disclosed within seven days during an election period, and at other times, within 21 days following the month the gift was received.

That means Australians will finally know who’s donating while policy issues – and elections – are still “live”.

The new rules also introduce caps on donations and electoral expenditure, helping to reduce the influence of money in politics. But the new rules unfairly advantage major parties over independents and new entrants.

The new total cap of $90 million for electoral expenditure by a political party is too high, keeping too much money in politics. And the per-seat spending cap of $800,000 is too low, advantaging incumbents over new entrants. There is also a loophole in the design of the donations cap that advantages major parties by allowing the cap to apply separately to each branch of a party.

The new legislation should be reviewed and amended to close the loopholes before the next federal election.

Kate Griffiths, Democracy Deputy Program Director, Grattan Institute and Matthew Bowes, Senior Associate, Economic Prosperity and Democracy, Grattan Institute

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

New South Wales is set to become the first jurisdiction in the country to end the use of good character references in the sentencing of convicted criminals.

The government will introduce a bill this week to amend the state’s sentencing laws. The amendment will stop people submitting references of their “good character” to lobby for more lenient sentences.

References attesting to the convicted criminal’s prospects for rehabilitation and their likelihood of reoffending will still be permitted.

The move acknowledges the potential re-traumatisation faced by victims when unsubstantiated character references from family and friends are submitted for consideration during sentencing hearings. Victims have stated the process can make them think the courts don’t care about or take seriously the harm they have experienced.

It’s a decision that aligns with expert evidence, so might other states follow suit?

What is a good character reference, exactly?

Good character references are letters presented to a court during the process of sentencing someone convicted of a crime. They are often provided by friends and family members, though references may be sought from employers, priests and other respected community members.

The references usually describe how the person is a valuable family or community member, has a good work record and no criminal history.

Character evidence can help a judge more fully understand the person they are sentencing and decide if they can be rehabilitated. Demonstrated prior good character enables the judge to ensure the appropriateness and fairness of the sentence.

But contemplating the subjective opinions of non-professionals regarding the possibility of rehabilitation can be problematic.

Such references have promoted people being sentenced for sexual assault and rape as having “high moral values”, being a “kind-hearted, loving father” or having a “good work ethic”.

Since 2009, NSW hasn’t allowed good character references for child sexual offenders who used their position of influence to gain access to victims.

But two sexual abuse victims, Harrison James and Jarad Grice, have led a campaign for more substantial change. Called Your Reference Ain’t Relevant, the campaign protested against convicted child sex offenders being able to produce glowing character references to reduce their sentence.

What does the evidence say?

The Australian Law Reform Commission has been reviewing justice responses to sexual violence. In its 2025 final report, the commission said it received submissions describing the provision of good character references for convicted sexual violence offenders as a “problematic” practice.

The commission noted the NSW Sentencing Council was reviewing the use of character evidence. It said the outcome of the NSW process would inform any suggestions for future reforms at a national level.

The New South Wales Sentencing Council’s report was released on February 1. It recommended legislation to prevent the court from using evidence that goes solely to a finding of good character. This legislation, however, may permit the court to consider other relevant evidence in sentencing.

The report states “there is no settled definition of what good character is, or what it reflects”. The council said the concept “has been criticised as being vague and incoherent […] lacking a settled definition”.

The council’s recommendations go beyond child sexual offences. They apply to all convicted offenders.

And for NSW at least, they would overrule a 2001 High Court decision allowing character to be considered in providing “some leniency” in sentencing.

Will other states do the same?

A report by the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Commission into the sentencing of sexual assault and rape recommended that some types of good character evidence be limited. It said good character evidence should only be used to assist the court in deciding on the rehabilitation or the potential recidivism of the convicted criminal.

The report recommended that courts have the option, depending on the nature or seriousness of an offence, to disregard character references when determining sentencing.

In September 2025, Queensland parliament passed legislation addressing the recommendations. The references can now only be considered to inform a judge’s assessment of the likelihood of rehabilitation or recidivism.

But as some frontline sexual assault services submitted in consultations this left open ways to circumvent the rule. Friends and family could provide references mentioning the prospects of rehabilitation.

So while there’s some movement on the issue in Queensland, if the NSW recommendations are to lead the way in nationwide reform, the task will not be easy.

Significant differences exist between the states. This is because apart from Commonwealth offences, criminal law remains primarily a state matter. This has produced divergent offence labels, maximum penalties and sentencing regimes.

Even on the specific issue of character evidence in child sexual offence proceedings, there are substantial differences in laws and contexts across the country.

These contrasts in approach to legislating the use of good character references in sentencing will, as observed by the Law Council of Australia, likely result in similar cases attracting different outcomes in different states.

But sometimes it just takes one bold attempt at reform to inspire action in others. As advocates have succeeded in NSW, it’s likely others will attempt similar change. State and territory governments have been put on notice.

Vicki Lowik, Adjunct Research Fellow, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Sciences, CQUniversity Australia and Amanda-Jane George, Associate professor, Bond University

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

Cosmic radio pulses repeating every few minutes or hours, known as long-period transients, have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in 2022. Our new study, published in Nature Astronomy today, might finally add some clarity.

Radio astronomers are very familiar with pulsars, a type of rapidly rotating neutron star. To us watching the skies from Earth, these objects appear to pulse because powerful radio beams from their poles sweep our telescopes – much like a cosmic lighthouse.

The slowest pulsars rotate in just a few seconds – this is known as their period. But in recent years, long-period transients have been discovered as well. These have periods from 18 minutes to more than six hours.

From everything we know about neutron stars, they shouldn’t be able to produce radio waves while spinning this slowly. So, is there something wrong with physics?

Well, neutron stars aren’t the only compact stellar remnant on the block, so maybe they’re not the stars of this story after all. Our new paper presents evidence that the longest-lived long-period transient, GPM J1839-10, is actually a white dwarf star. It’s producing powerful radio beams with the help of a stellar companion, implying others may be doing the same.

Enter white dwarf pulsars

Like neutron stars, white dwarfs are the remnants of dead stars. They’re about the size of Earth, but with an entire Sun’s-worth of mass packed in.

No isolated white dwarf has been observed to emit radio pulses. But they have the necessary ingredients to do so when paired with an M-type dwarf (a regular star about half the Sun’s mass) in a close two-star system known as a binary.

In fact, we know such rapidly spinning “white dwarf pulsars” exist because we’ve observed them – the first was confirmed in 2016.

Which raises the question: could long-period transients be the slower cousins of white dwarf pulsars?

More than ten long-period transients have been discovered to date, but they’re so far away and embedded so deep in our galaxy, it’s been difficult to tell what they are. Only in 2025 were two long-period transients conclusively identified as white dwarf–M-dwarf binaries. This was quite unexpected.

However, it left astronomers with more questions.

Even if some long-period transients are white dwarf–M-dwarf binaries, do they radiate in the same way as the faster white dwarf pulsars? And are the long-period transients only visible at radio wavelengths doomed to be a mystery forever?

What we needed is a model that works for both, and a long-period transient with enough high-quality data to test it on.

A uniquely long-lived example

In 2023 we discovered GPM J1839-10, a long-period transient with a 21-minute period. It was the second-ever such discovery, but unlike its predecessor or those found since, it is uniquely long-lived. Pulses were found in archival data going back as far as 1988, but only some of the times that they should have been detected.

As it’s 15,000 light-years away, we can only see it in radio waves. So we dug deeper into this seemingly random, intermittent signal to learn more.

We watched GPM J1839-10 in a series dubbed “round-the-world” observations. These used three telescopes, each passing the source to the next as Earth rotated: the Australian SKA Pathfinder or ASKAP, the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in the United States.

The intermittent signal turned out to not be random at all. The pulses arrive in groups of four or five, and the groups come in pairs separated by two hours. The entire pattern repeats every nine hours.

Such a stable pattern strongly implies the signal is coming from a binary system of two bodies orbiting each other every nine hours. And knowing the period also helps us work out their masses, which all adds up to being a white dwarf–M-dwarf binary.

Checking back, not only were the archival detections consistent with the same pattern, but we were able to use the combined data to refine the orbital period to a precision of just 0.2 seconds.

A heartbeat pattern

Radio data alone tells us GPM J1839-10 is definitely a binary system. What’s more, the peculiar heartbeat of its pulses gives clues to its nature in a way that’s only possible from looking at radio signals.

Inspired by a previous study on a white dwarf pulsar, we modelled GPM J1839-10 as a white dwarf generating a radio beam as its magnetic pole sweeps through its companion’s stellar wind. The varying alignment of the binary bodies with our line-of-sight throughout the orbit accurately predicts the heartbeat pattern.

We can even reconstruct the geometry of the system, such as how far apart the stars must be, and how massive they are.

All told, GPM J1839-10 has the potential to be the missing link between long-period transients and white dwarf pulsars.

Armed with our model, other astronomers have already been able to detect variability at our measured periods in high-precision optical data, despite not being able to distinguish the binary pair.

Research is ongoing on exactly how the emission physics works, and how the broader range of long-period transient properties fit together. However, this is a crucial step towards understanding.

Csanád Horváth, PhD Candidate, Radio Astronomy, Curtin University and Natasha Hurley-Walker, Radio Astronomer, Curtin University

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

If you’ve ever been constipated you may have tried laxatives. They’re easy to get without a prescription and often help get things moving.

Certainly a lot of people use laxatives and some older people are very reliant on them to help with bowel function.

But you might have heard it’s not a good idea to take them over the long term. Even though serious complications from chronic laxative use are rare, they do happen. That’s why, whenever possible, long-term laxative use should be guided and monitored by a doctor.

Types of laxatives

There are five main types of laxatives (all are oral):

1. bulk-forming laxatives (also known as fibre laxatives), which absorb water to form a soft, bulky stool and prompt normal contraction of bowel muscles. Common brands include Metamucil and Benefiber

2. osmotic laxatives, which draw water into the colon to allow easier passage of stool. Common brands include Osmolax, Actilax and Movicol

3. stool softeners such as docusate (brand name Coloxyl), which acts like a detergent and allows fat and water to mix in with hard stool – this makes it softer and easier to pass

4. stimulant laxatives, which trigger rhythmic contractions of the bowel muscle. Common brands include Dulcolax, Bisalax and Senna

5. lubricant laxatives, which coat the bowel and soften the stool. A common brand is Parachoc.

Starting a laxative

Before starting a laxative you should try dietary and lifestyle changes such as:

• eating more foods with fibre in them, such as kiwifruit, corn, oats and brown rice
• drinking more water
• doing more exercise.

But if constipation persists, you might think about a laxative. Consider starting with gentler options, such as the bulk-forming laxatives or stool softeners, and implement those dietary and lifestyle changes listed above.

It’s a good idea to see your local doctor when starting a laxative; constipation may be a sign of something more concerning, especially if there are other symptoms such as rectal bleeding.

Your doctor can also advise whether laxatives might interact with any other medications you take.

Do laxatives cause a ‘lazy colon’?

Probably not. So where does this idea come from?

A case report published in the 1960s described bowel changes in a patient who had been taking stimulant laxatives for more than 40 years.

When the colon was examined, doctors noticed a reduced number of key cells in the colon. This sparked concern about whether long-term use of stimulant laxatives could result in damage to the gut, culminating in a “lazy colon” (also known as a cathartic colon). This is when the colon becomes an inert tube with no real muscle function to push along stool.

However, a later review of more than 70 publications describing 240 cases of stimulant laxative abuse found no cases of cathartic colon reported. Researchers concluded the prior cathartic colon cases might have been linked to a laxative called podophyllin that is now no longer recommended.

A review of 43 publications on the safety of stimulant laxatives discovered many of the studies were of poor quality, with small sample size. Confounding factors, such as medications and age, were often not being taken into account.

It found no good evidence chronic use of stimulant laxatives damages the gut.

That said, there are other good reasons not to take laxatives regularly and over the long term unless advised by a doctor who is monitoring your progress.

Gut symptoms and electrolytes

Laxative abuse is when someone takes laxatives to lose weight through frequent and repeated use of laxatives.

The most common symptom of laxative abuse is diarrhoea, which can mean abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting and weight loss.

But laxative abuse can also disrupt the body’s electrolytes.

The main electrolyte in poo is potassium. As the body loses more and more potassium through diarrhoea, you can end up with lower blood potassium levels.

This can lead to:

• generalised muscle weakness
• heart complications
• changes in heart rhythm
• in extreme cases, stopping your heart beat, which can lead to death.

A 2020 systematic review of case reports found that laxative abuse can cause mild to severe cases of cardiac complications.

Laxative abuse can also lower other electrolytes, such as calcium and magnesium, leading to painful muscle contractions. Occasionally the kidney can be severely affected by chronic laxative abuse.

If you take just the recommended dose of laxatives, though, the risk of serious electrolyte complications is extremely low.

Depression, dementia and mental health

Two UK studies that examined a data set of approximately half a million participants found regular laxative use was associated with a higher risk of developing depression and dementia.

One theory is chronic laxative abuse could alter what’s known as the microbiome-gut-brain-axis (the way microbiota and the brain communicate) and lead to a higher risk of conditions such as depression and dementia.

Laxative abuse is commonly associated with eating disorders, so it’s important anyone found to be abusing laxatives also undergo a comprehensive mental health assessment. A plan might be needed to address the broader problem.

Safe when taken properly

Laxatives are obtained easily without a prescription and are very widely used in the community. They are certainly helpful for treating chronic constipation.

However, they can cause side effects such as diarrhoea and electrolyte imbalances. Long-term use and overuse can lead to problems.

It’s always a good idea to consult your doctor before starting laxatives, especially if you have other medical issues or are taking other medications.

Vincent Ho, Associate Professor and Clinical Academic Gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University

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

Coffee first entered human lives and veins over 600 years ago.

Now we consume an average of almost two kilos per person each year – sometimes with very specific preferences about blends and preparation methods. How much you drink is influenced by genes acting on your brain’s reward system and caffeine metabolism.

Coffee can raise your blood pressure in the short term, especially if you don’t usually drink it or if you already have high blood pressure.

But this doesn’t mean you need to cut out coffee if you have high blood pressure or are concerned about your heart health. Moderation is key.

So how does coffee affect your blood pressure? And if yours is high, how much is OK to drink?

What is high blood pressure?

Blood pressure is the force blood exerts on artery walls when your heart pumps. It’s measured by two numbers:

• the first and biggest number is systolic blood pressure, which is the force generated when your heart contracts and pushes blood out around your body

• the lower number, diastolic blood pressure, is the force when your heart relaxes and fills back up with blood.

Normal blood pressure is defined as systolic blood pressure of less than 120 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) and diastolic blood pressure of less than 80 mm Hg.

Once your numbers consistently reach 140/90 or more, blood pressure is considered high. This is also called hypertension.

Knowing your blood pressure numbers is important because hypertension doesn’t have any symptoms. When it goes untreated, or isn’t well-controlled, your risk of heart attacks and strokes increases, and existing kidney and heart disease worsens.

About 31% of adults have hypertension with half unaware they have it. Of those taking medication for hypertension, about 47% don’t have it well-controlled.

How does coffee affect blood pressure?

Caffeine in coffee is a muscle stimulant that increases the heart rate in some people. This can potentially contribute to an irregular heartbeat, known as arrhythmia.

Caffeine also stimulates adrenal glands to release adrenaline. This makes your heart beat faster and your blood vessels to constrict, which increases blood pressure.

Blood caffeine levels peak between 30 minutes and two hours after a cup of coffee. Caffeine’s half-life is 3–6 hours, meaning blood levels will reduce by about half during this time.

The range is due to age (kids have smaller, less mature livers so can’t metabolise it as fast), genetics (people can be fast or slow metabolisers) and whether you usually drink it (regular consumers clear it faster).

The impact of caffeine on blood pressure from coffee (and cola, energy drinks and chocolate) varies. Research reviews report increases in systolic blood pressure of 3–15 and a diastolic blood pressure increase of 4–13 after consumption.

The effect of caffeine also depends on a person’s usual blood pressure. An increase in blood pressure may be more risky if you have hypertension and existing heart or liver disease, so it’s best to discuss your coffee consumption with your doctor.

What else is in coffee?

Coffee contains hundreds of phytochemicals: compounds that contribute flavour, aroma, or influence health and disease.

Phytochemicals that directly affect blood pressure include melanoidins, which regulate the body’s fluid volume and activity of enzymes that help control blood pressure.

Quinic acid is another phytochemical shown to lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure by improving the lining of blood vessels, allowing them to better accommodate blood pressure rises.

Can coffee cause hypertension?

In a review of 13 studies that included 315,000 people, researchers examined associations between coffee intake and the risk of hypertension.

During study follow-up periods, 64,650 people developed hypertension, with the researchers concluding coffee drinking was not associated with an increased risk of developing the condition.

Even when they examined data by gender, amount of coffee, decaffeinated versus caffeinated, smoking or years of follow-up, coffee was still not associated with an increased risk of developing hypertension.

The only exceptions suggesting lower risk were for five studies from the United States and seven low-quality studies, meaning those results should be interpreted with caution.

A separate Japanese study followed more than 18,000 adults aged 40–79 years for 18.9 years. This included about 1,800 people who had very high blood pressure (grade 2-3 hypertension), with systolic blood pressure of 160 or above or diastolic blood pressure of 100 or above.

Here, risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, including heart attack or stroke, was double among those drinking two or more cups of coffee a day compared to non-drinkers.

There were no associations with death from cardiovascular disease for those who had either normal blood pressure or mild (grade 1) hypertension (systolic blood pressure 140–159 or diastolic blood pressure 90–99).

The bottom line

There is no need to give up coffee. Here’s what to do instead:

1. know your blood pressure, health history and which food and drinks contain caffeine

2. consider all factors that influence your blood pressure and health – family history, diet, salt and physical activity – so you can make informed decisions about what you consume and how much you move

3. be aware of how caffeine affects you and avoid it before having your blood pressure measured

4. avoid caffeine in the afternoon so it doesn’t affect your sleep

5. aim to moderate your coffee intake by drinking four cups or less a day or switching to decaf

6. if you have systolic blood pressure of 160 or above or diastolic blood pressure of 100 or above, consider limiting to one cup a day, and talk to you doctor. 

Clare Collins, Laureate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

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

For people with migraine, summer can be a double-edged sword. You may be able to relax more, sleep in, enjoy the sunshine, and spend time with family and friends.

But other factors – such as glare, heat, and changes to sleeping and diet – can make migraine attacks more likely or more severe.

Migraine is a disabling neurological disorder affecting 5 million Australians. In addition to a throbbing headache, it can cause hypersensitivity to light, sound, smells or movement.

Triggers for attacks vary from person to person and seasonal changes don’t affect everyone. But if you find your migraine attacks are worse or more likely in summer, knowing why can help you prepare.

The effect of hot weather

Normally when it is hot, you sweat more to regulate your core temperature. Your body becomes cooler when sweat evaporates off your body.

In summer when the air is hotter and there is more humidity, your brain’s hypothalamus causes blood vessels close to the skin to dilate so that heat can escape.

But people with migraine often have hypersensitive nerves and blood vessels. When blood vessels dilate in the heat, it can irritate nearby nerves and cause inflammation, which the migraine brain interprets as pain. This is due to the brain’s stress response, not an infection.

Dehydration

Sweating helps regulate your core body temperature, cooling you down as the sweat evaporates off your skin. But when the air is hot and humid, it’s harder for the sweat to evaporate and cool us down.

This can lead to dehydration – another potent trigger.

Why is dehydration so bad?

Imagine your brain like a sponge that is floating in spinal fluid within your skull. If you are dehydrated, the brain shrinks like a dry sponge and pulls on the attachments to the skull, which can trigger pain.

If you are well hydrated, the brain can expand to fill the space within the skull so there is less “pulling” and therefore less pain.

Sensitivity to light

For many people with migraine, glare is more than a minor annoyance – bright lights and reflection can cause pain and trigger attacks.

When light enters the back of the eye, special cells (retinal ganglion cells) process this signal and send messages to the brain’s sensory centre (the thalamus).

In migraine, these sensory pain pathways involving the thalamus are hypersensitive. Any extra light – or flickering or moving lights – is perceived as pain, rather than merely brightness, and can also lead to dizziness.

Glare also reduces the contrast of incoming light signals, so the brain’s visual centre (the visual cortex) needs to work extra hard to process signals. Certain wavelengths can also be harder to process (including blue and fluorescent light, or sunlight reflecting off screens). This can cause pain.

Disrupted routines

The migraine brain does not like change. But longer days in summer can mean changes to our routines.

Changes that might trigger a migraine include sleeping at inconsistent times on holidays, skipping or delaying meals, or changes in stress levels. This means new stress, increased stress – or even relaxing after a stressful period.

Changes in sensory information that the brain processes can also worsen migraine. This may include new smells (such as sunscreen or insect repellent), louder noises (excited children on holidays), and brighter light or glare.

Even exercising more than usual may be a trigger for some people.

Thunderstorms

Pollen, humidity and thunderstorms trigger allergy flares in people with asthma, hayfever and eczema. This makes the immune system release chemicals called histamine, which can trigger migraine attacks in some people.

Asthma and allergy action plans are doubly important for wellbeing in this group.

Sudden changes in air pressure (in aeroplanes and during storms) can also be a strong trigger for some people. Your friend who says they can predict the weather by their migraine symptoms may be right.

Know your triggers

Regardless of the season, being prepared is the key.

Keep a diary of your headache days and impacts of weather (temperature, humidity, glare) or activities (for example, how much you’re socialising or exercising). Headache neurologists can use this data to give you a targeted migraine plan.

In summer, you can also:

• plan outings for cooler days of the week or times of day

• limit sun and pack a hat and sunglasses. Lenses that are polarised or FL41-tinted may help beat glare

• carry water bottles and electrolyte-rich fluids to avoid dehydration

• set phone alarms so that you go to bed and wake up at consistent times

• try to maintain regular balanced meals, without excess sugar, alcohol and processed foods.

Taking care of your medication

It’s also important to plan and correctly store your migraine medication, especially if you’re going on a trip. You should:

• take acute migraine medications with you and make sure they’re up-to-date

• check your scripts are current and you have repeats left

• protect medications from heat. Don’t store them in the glovebox or bag in the sun for long periods. Injectable medications should be stored in the fridge below 4°C until use.

When travelling, you may need to adjust timing of doses or use a cooler bag to keep medication cool.

If you think you’re sensitive to seasonal changes, it’s best to talk to your neurologist about a migraine management plan. This can help you identify and manage key triggers and prevent and treat acute attacks.

Lakshini Gunasekera, PhD Candidate in Neurology, Monash University and Elspeth Hutton, Head, Headache Service Alfred Health & Monash Neuroscience Headache Group, Monash University

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

On Wednesday, the federal government announced plans to reform how medications are dispensed and tracked, aiming to reduce unsafe use, stockpiling and “doctor shopping”.

This will include two stages. First, the government will require all online and telehealth prescribers to upload information about a patient’s prescribed medications to their My Health Record.

Second, the government plans to develop a National Medicines Record – an over-arching database to register and monitor all current prescriptions.

So, how would this work? While some detail is still lacking, here’s what we know.

Why is this needed?

An increasing number of Australians take multiple medications. Recent research analysing prescribing patterns in Australia estimates almost two million of us took five or more regular medicines in 2024.

While multiple medicines are often needed to manage multiple conditions, there are risks of adverse effects.

And when a clinician prescribes medication or a pharmacist dispenses it without a full understanding of the patient’s current medications, it can lead to harmful interactions between them.

This can make a patient sicker and often lands them in hospital. An estimated 1.5 million people in Australia experience some kind of harmful side effect from using medicine each year.

Those at particular risk are older adults taking numerous medications, as well as those transitioning between health-care settings (such as going into hospital or returning home).

Sometimes patients also stockpile medications, including through consulting multiple doctors, known as “doctor shopping”. For example, they might do this to obtain extra supplies of addictive pain medication.

How does it work right now?

Currently, there is no centralised, mandatory register that records all of the medicines a person is prescribed and dispensed.

Instead, prescribing information may be siloed in hospital and aged care systems, general practice records and those of online telehealth providers such as Instant Scripts, 13SICK and Hola Health.

This can prevent any single doctor or pharmacist from having clear, comprehensive information about a patient’s medications.

Some health-care practitioner and pharmacy bodies have criticised the online prescribing industry, in particular, for contributing to inappropriate prescribing and medication misuse.

For high-risk medications such as opioids, there is already a Real Time Prescription Monitoring system. Victoria has a similar system called SafeScript, but this doesn’t record the full range of prescription medications.

Announcing the reforms, Health Minister Mark Butler referred to an Australian woman who died from an overdose after stockpiling her medicine. He explained her parent’s advocacy prompted the government to address the lack of a comprehensive medicines record.

What will change?

First, the government will require online and telehealth prescribing platforms to add information to the My Health Record system about prescribed medications. This will include information about the clinical reasoning for prescribing.

My Health Record is a government-run platform providing a secure, online collection of a patient’s health information. Both patients and their treating health-care professionals can access it.

So any medication or related clinical information uploaded by a prescriber would be accessible via My Health Record, to the patient as well as to their health-care providers and pharmacists.

Many general practices already upload this information, but online prescribing platforms may not. Organisations representing pharmacists have long called for this kind of change.

Will it work?

In theory, it is a step forward. The challenge is that the My Health Record system remains under-used. One in 10 Australians have no My Health Record (the system is opt-out).

For the millions of Australians who do have a My Health Record, usage is increasing. But many still have never accessed their own record.

It is also not clear whether, and how, a patient’s access to their own My Health Record would reduce medication harm (particularly if the patient is deliberately stockpiling medication).

Almost all GPs, pharmacies and public hospitals are registered for My Health Record and have used the system. But data shows pharmacies are mainly using it to upload information rather than looking at records others have uploaded.

Overall, ensuring that all medicines information is available on the My Health Record is a positive step.

But it does not mean that the information will be accessed (or understood) by others who are prescribing and dispensing medication to a patient.

Indeed, sadly, the warnings that were placed by hospital services on the My Health Record of the young woman who died from an overdose were not accessed by telehealth services nor pharmacies prescribing and supplying her with medication.

What’s ahead?

As a second step, the government says it will design and build a National Medicines Record. This would be an overarching platform linked to My Health Record and other digital health systems, to register all current prescriptions.

At this stage, detail is lacking, but health-care practitioner and pharmacy bodies are broadly supportive.

A consultation is underway.

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

Megan Prictor, Associate Professor in Health Technology Law, The University of Melbourne

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

Athletic footwear has entered a new era of ambition. No longer content to promise just comfort or performance, Nike claims its shoes can activate the brain, heighten sensory awareness and even improve concentration by stimulating the bottom of your feet.

“By studying perception, attention and sensory feedback, we’re tapping into the brain-body connection in new ways,” said Nike’s chief science officer, Matthew Nurse, in the company’s press release for the shoes. “It’s not just about running faster — it’s about feeling more present, focused and resilient.”

Other brands like Naboso sell “neuro-insoles,” socks and other sensory-based footwear to stimulate the nervous system.

It’s a compelling idea: The feet are rich in sensory receptors, so could stimulating them really sharpen the mind?

As a neurosurgeon who studies the brain, I’ve found that neuroscience suggests the reality is more complicated – and far less dramatic – than the marketing implies.

Close links between feet and brain

The soles of the feet contain thousands of mechanoreceptors that detect pressure, vibration, texture and movement.

Signals from these receptors travel through peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and up to an area of the brain called the somatosensory cortex, which maintains a map of the body. The feet occupy a meaningful portion of this map, reflecting their importance in balance, posture and movement.

Footwear also affects proprioception – the brain’s sense of where the body is in space – which relies on input from muscles, joints and tendons. Because posture and movement are tightly linked to attention and arousal, changes in sensory feedback from the feet can influence how stable, alert or grounded a person feels.

This is why neurologists and physical therapists pay close attention to footwear in patients with balance disorders, neuropathy or gait problems. Changing sensory input can alter how people move.

But influencing movement is not the same thing as enhancing cognition.

Minimalist shoes and sensory awareness

Minimalist shoes, with thinner soles and greater flexibility, allow more information about touch and body position to reach the brain compared with heavily cushioned footwear. In laboratory studies, reduced cushioning can increase a wearer’s awareness of where their foot is placed and when it’s touching the ground, sometimes improving their balance or the steadiness of their gait.

However, more sensation is not automatically better. The brain constantly filters sensory input, prioritizing what is useful and suppressing what is distracting. For people unaccustomed to minimalist shoes, the sudden increase in sensory feedback may increase cognitive load – drawing attention toward the feet rather than freeing mental resources for focus or performance.

Sensory stimulation can heighten awareness, but there is a threshold beyond which it becomes noise.

Can shoes improve concentration?

Whether sensory footwear can improve concentration is where neuroscience becomes especially skeptical.

Sensory input from the feet activates somatosensory regions of the brain. But brain activation alone does not equal cognitive enhancement. Focus, attention and executive function depend on distributed networks involving various other areas of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe and the thalamus. They also rely on hormones that modulate the nervous system, such as dopamine and norepinephrine.

There is little evidence that passive underfoot stimulation – textured soles, novel foam geometries or subtle mechanical features – meaningfully improves concentration in healthy adults. Some studies suggest that mild sensory input may increase alertness in specific populations – such as older adults training to improve their balance or people in rehabilitation for sensory loss – but these effects are modest and highly dependent on context.

Put simply, feeling more sensory input does not mean the brain’s attention systems are working better.

Belief, expectation and embodied experience

While shoes may not directly affect your cognition, that does not mean the mental effects people report are imaginary.

Belief and expectation still play a powerful role in medicine. Placebo effects and their influence on perception, motivation and performance are well documented in neuroscience. If someone believes a shoe improves focus or performance, that belief alone can change perception and behavior – sometimes enough to produce measurable effects.

There is also growing interest in embodied cognition, the idea that bodily states influence mental processes. Posture, movement and physical stability can shape mood, confidence and perceived mental clarity. Footwear that alters how someone stands or moves may indirectly influence how focused they feel, even if it does not directly enhance cognition.

In the end, believing a product gives you an advantage may be the most powerful effect it has.

Where science and marketing diverge

The problem is not whether footwear influences the nervous system – it does – but imprecision. When companies claim their shoes are “mind-altering,” they often blur the distinction between sensory modulation and cognitive enhancement.

Neuroscience supports the idea that shoes can change sensory input, posture and movement. It does not support claims that footwear can reliably improve concentration or attention for the general population. If shoes truly produced strong cognitive changes, those effects would be robust, measurable and reproducible. So far, they are not.

Shoes can change how we feel in our bodies, how you move through space and how aware you are of your physical environment. Those changes may influence confidence, comfort and perception – all of which matter to experience.

But the most meaningful “mind-altering” effects a person can experience through physical fitness still come from sustained movement, training, sleep and attention – not from sensation alone. Footwear may shape how the journey feels, but it is unlikely to rewire the destination.

Atom Sarkar, Professor of Neurosurgery, Drexel University

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

A variety show that’s still revered for its absurdist, slapstick humor debuted 50 years ago. It starred an irreverent band of characters made of foam and fleece.

Long after “The Muppet Show”‘s original 120-episode run ended in 1981, the legend and legacy of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo and other creations concocted by puppeteer and TV producer Jim Henson have kept on growing. Thanks to the Muppets’ film franchise and the wonders of YouTube, the wacky gang is still delighting, and expanding, its fan base.

As a scholar of popular culture, I believe that the Muppets’ reign, which began in the 1950s, has helped shape global culture, including educational television. Along the way, the puppets and the people who bring them to life have earned billions in revenue.

Kermit’s origin story

Muppets, a portmanteau of marionette and puppet, first appeared on TV in the Washington, D.C., region in 1955, when Henson created a short sketch show called “Sam and Friends” with his future wife, Jane Nebel.

Their motley cast of puppets, including a lizardlike character named Kermit, sang parody songs and performed comedy sketches.

Henson’s creations were soon popping up in segments on other TV shows, including “Today” and late-night programs. Rowlf the Dog appeared in Canadian dog food commercials before joining “The Jimmy Dean Show” as the host’s sidekick.

After that show ended, Rowlf and Dean performed on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” where Kermit had occasionally appeared since 1961.

From ‘Sesame Street’ to ‘SNL’

As Rowlf and Kermit made the rounds on variety shows, journalist Joan Ganz Cooney and psychologist Lloyd Morrisett were creating a new educational program. They invited Henson to provide a Muppet ensemble for the show.

Henson waived his performance fee to maintain rights over the characters who became the most famous residents of “Sesame Street.” The likes of Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster and Big Bird were joined by Kermit who, by the time the show premiered in 1969, was identified as a frog.

When “Sesame Street” became a hit, Henson worried that his Muppets would be typecast as children’s entertainment. Another groundbreaking show, aimed at young adults, offered him a chance to avoid that.

“Saturday Night Live’s” debut on NBC in 1975 – when the show was called “Saturday Night” – included a segment called “The Land of Gorch,” in which Henson’s grotesque creatures drank, smoked and cracked crass jokes.

“The Land of Gorch” segments ended after “Saturday Night Live’s” first season.

Miss Piggy gets her closeup

“The Muppet Show” was years in the making. ABC eventually aired two TV specials in 1974 and 1975 that were meant to be pilots for a U.S.-produced “Muppet Show.”

After no American network picked up his quirky series, Henson partnered with British entertainment entrepreneur Lew Grade to produce a series for ATV, a British network, that featured Kermit and other Muppets. The new ensemble included Fozzie Bear, Animal and Miss Piggy – Muppets originally performed by frequent Henson collaborator Frank Oz.

“The Muppet Show” parodied variety shows on which Henson had appeared. Connections he’d made along the way paid off: Many celebrities he met on those shows’ sets would guest star on “The Muppet Show,” including everyone from Rita Moreno and Lena Horne to Joan Baez and Johnny Cash.

“The Muppet Show,” which was staged and shot at a studio near London, debuted on Sept. 5, 1976, in the U.K, before airing in syndication in the United States on stations like New York’s WCBS.

The Muppets hit the big screen

“The Muppet Show” was a hit, amassing a global audience of over 200 million. It won many awards, including a Primetime Emmy for outstanding comedy-variety or music series – for which it beat “Saturday Night Live” – in 1978.

While his TV show was on the air, Henson worked on the franchise’s first film, “The Muppet Movie.” The road film, released in 1979, was another hit: It earned more than US$76 million at the box office.

“The Muppet Movie” garnered two Academy Award nominations for its music, including best song for “Rainbow Connection.” It won a Grammy for best album for children.

The next two films, “The Great Muppet Caper,” which premiered in 1981, and “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” released in 1984, also garnered Oscar nominations for their music.

‘Fraggle Rock’ and the Disney deal

The cast of “The Muppet Show” and the three films took a break from Hollywood while Henson focused on “Fraggle Rock,” a TV show for kids that aired from 1983-1987 on HBO.

Like Henson’s other productions, “Fraggle Rock” featured absurdist humor – but its puppets aren’t considered part of the standard Muppets gang. This co-production between Henson, Canadian Broadcast Corporation and British producers was aimed at international markets.

The quickly conglomerating media industry led Henson to consider corporate partnerships to assist with his goal of further expanding the Muppet media universe.

In August 1989, he negotiated a deal with Michael Eisner of Disney who announced at Disney-MGM Studios an agreement in principle to acquire The Muppets, with Henson maintaining ownership of the “Sesame Street” characters.

The announcement also included plans to open Muppet-themed attractions at Disney parks.

But less than a year later, on May 16, 1990, Henson died from a rare and serious bacterial infection. He was 53.

Of Muppets and mergers

Henson’s death led to the Disney deal’s collapse. But the company did license The Muppets to Disney, which co-produced “The Muppet Christmas Carol” in 1992 and “Muppet Treasure Island” in 1996 with Jim Henson Productions, which was then run by Jim’s son, Brian Henson.

In 2000, the Henson family sold the Muppet properties to German media company EM.TV & Merchandising AG for $680 million. That company ran into financial trouble soon after, then sold the Sesame Street characters to Sesame Workshop for $180 million in late 2000. The Jim Henson Company bought back the remaining Muppet properties for $84 million in 2003.

In 2004, Disney finally acquired The Muppets and most of the media library associated with the characters.

Disney continued to produce Muppet content, including “The Muppet’s Wizard of Oz” in 2005. Its biggest success came with the 2011 film “The Muppets,” which earned over $165 million at the box office and won the Oscar for best original song “Man or Muppet.”

“Muppets Most Wanted,” released in 2014, earned another $80 million worldwide, bringing total global box office receipts to over $458 million across eight theatrical Muppets movies.

The ‘Muppet Show’ goes on

The Muppets continue to expand their fandom across generations and genres by performing at live concerts and appearing in several series and films.

Through these many hits and occasional bombs, and the Jim Henson Company’s personnel changes, the Muppets have adapted to changes in technology and tastes, making it possible for them to remain relevant to new generations.

That cast of characters made of felt and foam continue to entertain fans of all ages. Although many people remain nostalgic over “The Muppet Show,” two prior efforts to reboot the show proved short-lived.

But when Disney airs its “The Muppet Show” anniversary special on Feb. 4, 2026, maybe more people will get hooked as Disney looks to reboot the series

Jared Bahir Browsh, Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

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

When most of us look out at the ocean, we see a mostly flat blue surface stretching to the horizon. It’s easy to imagine the sea beneath as calm and largely static – a massive, still abyss far removed from everyday experience.

But the ocean is layered, dynamic and constantly moving, from the surface down to the deepest seafloor. While waves, tides and currents near the coast are familiar and accessible, far less is known about what happens several kilometres below, where the ocean meets the seafloor.

Our new research, published in the journal Ocean Science, shows water near the the seafloor is in constant motion, even in the abyssal plains of the Pacific Ocean. This has important consequences for climate, ecosystems and how we understand the ocean as an interconnected system.

Enter the abyss

The central and eastern Pacific Ocean include some of Earth’s largest abyssal regions (places where the sea is more than 3,000 metres deep). Here, most of the seafloor lies four to six kilometres below the surface. It is shaped by vast abyssal plains, fracture zones and seamounts.

It is cold and dark, and the water and ecosystems here are under immense pressure from the ocean above.

Just above the seafloor, no matter the depth, sits a region known as the bottom mixed layer. This part of the ocean is relatively uniform in temperature, salinity and density because it is stirred through contact with the seafloor.

Rather than a thin boundary, this layer can extend from tens to hundreds of metres above the seabed. It plays a crucial role in the movement of heat, nutrients and sediments between the pelagic ocean and the seabed, including the beginning of the slow return of water from the bottom of the ocean toward the surface as part of global ocean circulation.

Observations focused on the bottom mixed layer are rare, but this is beginning to change. Most ocean measurements focus on the upper few kilometres, and deep observations are scarce, expensive and often decades apart.

In the Pacific especially, scientists have long known that cold Antarctic waters flow northward, along topographic features such as the Tonga-Kermadec Ridge and the Izu-Ogasawara and Japan Trenches.

But the finer details of how these waters interact with seafloor features in ways that intermittently stir and reshape the bottom layer of the ocean has remained largely unknown.

Investigating the abyss

To investigate the Pacific abyssal ocean, my colleagues and I combined new surface-to-seafloor measurements collected during a trans-Pacific expedition with high-quality repeat data about the physical features of the ocean gathered over the past two decades.

These observations allowed us to examine temperature and pressure all the way down to the seafloor over a wide range of latitudes and longitudes.

We then compared multiple scientific methods for identifying the bottom mixed layer and used machine learning techniques to understand what factors best explain the variations in its thickness.

Rather than being a uniform layer, we found the bottom mixed layer in the abyssal Pacific varies dramatically. In some regions it was less than 100m thick; in others it exceeded 700m.

This variability is not random; it’s controlled by the seafloor depth and the interactions between waves generated by surface tides and rough landscapes on the seabed.

In other words, the deepest ocean is not quietly stagnant as is often imagined. It is continually stirred by remote forces, shaped by seafloor features, and dynamically connected to the rest of the ocean above.

Just as coastal waters are shaped by waves, currents and sediment movement, the abyssal ocean is shaped by its own set of drivers. However, it is operating over larger distances and longer timescales.

Connected to the rest of the world

This matters for several reasons.

First, the bottom mixed layer influences how heat is stored and redistributed in the ocean, affecting long-term climate change. Some ocean and climate models still simplify seabed mixing, which can lead to errors in how future climate is projected.

Second, it plays a role in transporting sediment and seabed ecosystems. As interest grows in deep-sea mining and other activities on the high seas, understanding how the seafloor environment changes, and importantly how seafloor disturbances might spread, becomes increasingly important.

Our results highlight how little of the deep ocean we actually observe.

Large areas of the abyssal Pacific remain effectively unsampled, even as international agreements such as the new UN High Seas Treaty seek to manage and protect these regions.

The deep ocean is not a silent, static place. It is active, connected to the oceans above and changing. If we want to make informed decisions about the future of the high seas, we need to understand what’s happening at the very bottom in space and time.

Jessica Kolbusz, Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Western Australia

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

Is governing harder in the 2020s than in earlier decades? The instinctive, and popular, answer would be “of course it is”. While that’s also a correct answer, we should insert some qualifications.

Making the right or best decisions, especially in times of actual or looming crisis, has always been difficult. Consider the choices facing decision-makers, in Australia and abroad, during the Great Depression, when there was less understanding of how financial and economic systems worked than contemporary policymakers possess.

Consider also the choices that confronted leaders in past wars. Wartime prime minister John Curtin, grappling with decisions on which hung the lives of thousands of Australian troops, paced The Lodge grounds at night. And what of the challenges facing public health authorities trying to cope with the influenza epidemic that followed the first world war, compared with responding to the COVID pandemic in a time when vaccines could be developed quickly?

While keeping history in mind, however, it is undoubtedly true that contemporary governments face extraordinary changes and complexities. These come from many sources.

More demands for the provision of services. An interconnected world but fragmented public squares. Populations in democratic countries that have lost trust in government and in many other institutions. The rise of populism and the desire for instant answers to political and economic problems that do not lend themselves to easy, if any, solutions.

Modern travel, communications and technology have facilitated governing, as well as bringing their own challenges. Easier, faster and more comfortable travel means greater opportunities for face-to-face interaction, while imposing its own burdens. Email and “virtual” meetings have transformed interactions.

The internet is a massive information hub, the scale of which was beyond imagination only decades ago. It is also a monster that disseminates misinformation and disinformation on an industrial scale, and facilitates political intimidation.

Past reforms ‘not easy at the time’

Comparing the Bob Hawke and Anthony Albanese eras, “It’s become a truism of Australian politics that important economic reform peaked in the 1980s and 1990s. Sometimes the first two terms of John Howard’s government […] are given credit as well”, John Daley, of the Grattan Institute, wrote in Gridlock: Removing barriers to policy reform, in 2021. That report looked at the fate of a plethora of reforms the institute proposed between 2009 and 2019, finding more than two thirds of them had not been adopted.

In Australia, the Hawke–Keating government is often looked upon as a sort of “gold standard” for a reforming Labor government. It is unfair to measure a first-term administration against one that lasted several terms, and especially one that has been so mythologised. All the same, some critics have argued the Albanese government in its initial term was not pitching its aspiration high enough – let alone anything like as high as that earlier government.

Leaving aspiration aside, there is the other question. Was it easier in the Hawke–Keating days for a government to get things done – in particular, really difficult things? The answer is, almost certainly. But let us not romanticise the view through the rear vision mirror. Ken Henry, a public servant and Keating staffer during those days, told the National Press Club in 2025, “these reforms of the 80s and 90s mostly enjoy broad business and political support today, but they were not easy at the time”.

Moreover, some observers see downsides. “In recent months, there’s been a lot of breathless praise for the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. But where did some of those reforms lead?” ABC economics writer Gareth Hutchens wrote in 2025. “Some eventually led to appalling scandals that ended in royal commissions (banking, aged care, Robodebt). Changes to Australia’s labour market in that period contributed to the rise of underemployment and precarious work.”

Much momentum for Australia’s economic reforms in the 1980s, stretching into the 1990s, was imposed from outside. Australia was under pressure from external forces to open its economy to the world. This produced winners and losers, but in many cases the losers (whether from tax changes, or slashing tariffs) could, where considered necessary, be compensated. This didn’t prevent pain, but it could ameliorate some of it.

‘More pessimistic, fractious and negative’

By the time of the Albanese government, much of the big reform had been done, or tried. The public had become pain-averse; the drag of “reform fatigue” had been canvassed for years. Trust in government, declining for decades, was down again after a brief revival during the pandemic.

The more difficult territory – such as improving productivity, which had languished for years – proved to be harder to navigate than some of the landmark changes under Hawke, Keating and the early days of John Howard. With a tight budgetary situation, there wasn’t money to compensate losers – and there was less tolerance for policies where some people would lose.

By the 2020s the community had grown more pessimistic, fractious and negative, uncertain where the country was headed. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer’s Australian report highlighted the extent of “grievance”.

It found 62% of Australians had a moderate or high sense of grievance. (This was defined as a belief by the person that government and business make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and that wealthy people benefit under the system while ordinary people struggle.)

Fewer than one in five people believed things would be better for the next generation. Nearly two thirds (64%) worried that government leaders purposely mislead by saying things they know are false or are gross exaggerations. The barometer found a “zero sum” mindset increasingly permeating Australian society:

Those Australians with high grievances are twice as likely to feel that ‘what helps people who don’t share my politics will come at a cost to me’ compared with those with low grievances.

An environment marked by distrust and grievance makes governing difficult, let alone the pursuit of reform. Moreover, the modern plethora of well-resourced interest groups will be positioned to exploit grievance – indeed that is often central to their business models. Social media is god’s gift to those fanning grievances.

On the whole, people are more trustful if they feel they have agency – the opportunity for a voice, however small. The increasing professionalisation of politics, and the thinning out of the memberships and power within the major parties have further weakened the connection between citizens and the political process.

In today’s world, for multiple reasons, fewer people are “joiners” of parties, or other organisations. At the same time, the major parties give less encouragement to the political amateurs who want to be involved.

‘Cartel parties’

As late as the 1980s and early 1990s, ALP rank-and-file members had some clout, with the party’s national conference fights over policy (for example, uranium mining and export, reform of the banking system, privatisation) carrying weight. Progressively, however, the extra-parliamentary Labor Party membership declined in importance (with the exception that it gained a 50% say in choosing the parliamentary leader).

This is in line with an international trend. John Daley and Rachel Krust write in their Institutional Reform Stocktake (2025) that “major parties around the world have increasingly become ‘cartel parties’ in which members promise each other the benefits of government patronage, part of the machinery of government operated by a professional political class”. As modern ALP national conferences became much bigger in size, they took on the nature of stage-managed rallies, losing policy teeth.

At the 2025 election, for the second time running, only about two thirds of electors voted number one for Labor or the Coalition. The loss of faith in the major parties has been accompanied by people seeking agency in part through the “community candidate” movement.

Independent candidates (“teals” but others, too) have attracted large numbers of enthusiastic followers. The number of House of Representatives crossbenchers swelled in the 2020s, compared with the preceding decades.

This fragmentation, however, does not necessarily promote reform. Crossbenchers can sometimes achieve change by advocacy on particular issues, or by using positions of power to extract concessions (for example, in the Senate). To achieve transformational change, however, may require a government with a substantial, or at least a comfortable, majority. We saw this with Howard’s GST reform, when a big majority went to near defeat.

The “localism” reflected in the community candidate movement has been matched to a degree in the big parties, which often feel the need to preselect a “local champion”, such as someone who has served as mayor, from the particular electorate, making it hard to get policy-oriented “high flyers” into seats, especially when these days fewer seats are “safe” for the party.

The electoral cycle as ‘permanent campaign’

Short federal parliamentary terms – a flexible three years – are not conducive to bringing in potentially unpopular policies. Addressing the British Labour conference in 2025, Albanese noted that in the United Kingdom, which has five-year terms, they had “the most valuable resource for any Labor Government” – time.

Both sides of politics acknowledge the handicap of short terms, but by now have accepted that terms cannot in practice be lengthened, because (on recent history) it would seem impossible to pass the required referendum.

Terms could be made fixed by legislation, however there has not been the bipartisan will for that. (After the 2025 election, the Special Minister of State, Don Farrell, did ask the parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters to examine fixed four-year terms and increasing the size of the parliament.)

But the problem is not just the short length of terms. The electoral cycle has progressively become the “permanent campaign” with the government, especially the prime minister, seemingly never off the election trail, physically or mentally. This may have become so entrenched that longer terms might not significantly change things.

The contemporary phenomenon of the “continuous campaign” is reinforced by the frequency of opinion polling, and the attention given to it. It shapes much of the media discourse, and the use of it by the parties themselves means their eyes are, much of the time, on what the “focus groups” are saying. These trends were present in the 1980s but had reached new heights by the 2020s.

Leaders ‘crucial’ in driving reform

Much of the Hawke–Keating Government’s success in achieving economic reform was that it could harness the power and co-operation of the trade unions. The formal “Accord” between the government and unions meant the government could achieve trade-offs with the union movement – wage restraint in return for “social wage” benefits (Medicare, for example, and later a national superannuation contribution scheme).

The union movement of the day covered a much larger proportion of the workforce and had some impressive leaders who were willing to sign up to the government’s often controversial reform projects.

The Albanese government delivered significantly to the unions in its first term, including support for wage rises and a raft of changes to industrial laws, but it did not get offsets. The coverage of the union movement had shrunk drastically, and its leadership was not of the 1980s–90s calibre.

It is hard to recall how different the media landscape was in the Hawke–Keating years. This was the time before social media, and when the mainstream media were more influential for a government that wanted to drive change and achieve ambitious policy outcomes.

As a reforming treasurer, Keating was able to skilfully win influential parts of the media to his causes. Keating used to say, with his typical exaggeration, “if I’ve got the top five journalists in the press gallery supporting a policy, I’ve got the country”.

In the 2020s, not only are the media splintered every which way by the growth of social media, but traditional media are also increasingly polarised and less influential, especially with younger voters who obtain their information elsewhere.

The new round-the-clock, digital media environment has brought extra pressures on governing. How to sell measures has become almost as important in formulating policy as the substance. More generally, the government feels it imperative to fill the media space, which requires deploying ministers to the extensive round of morning TV and radio programs, interviews on the news channels through the day, evening current affairs, Sunday shows, and the like.

Arguably, the extent of the media burden on ministers takes away from the time and attention they can focus on detailed policy work.

Reform in any age requires leaders who can identify what needs to be done; grasp the policy challenges; are able and willing to be bold; and can persuade the public. The centrality of leadership in driving reform is crucial. In Hawke, Labor had a leader who could draw on strong personal popularity and was willing to spend political capital (although not be profligate with it – he acted as a restraining hand on his treasurer).

Albanese in his first term was a much more cautious brand of leader, mostly unwilling to exceed what he saw as his mandate. He also had a thin majority. Effective leadership must extend beyond the leader. Keating as treasurer was willing to stretch the boundaries. Albanese’s treasurer, Jim Chalmers, began his career by studying Keating attentively, but is still to be seriously tested himself.

Importantly, the Cabinet of the Hawke–Keating era was deep in its talent and its ambition. Its expenditure review committee was exceptionally hard-working. While the dynamics of the Albanese Cabinet are more opaque, there is not the breadth of talent or common reform purpose of its predecessor.

With Labor’s massive 2025 victory, calls immediately redoubled for the government to set its sights high. Slow economic growth, flatlined productivity and an uncertain external environment added to the push.

Stakeholders dusted off their reform proposals. A roundtable on “productivity”, which the treasurer immediately branded an “Economic Reform” Roundtable, was summoned by the government. That was the easy part.

Whether Albanese’s second-term government would have the will to significantly break the reform “gridlock” will be quite another matter. The prime minister might be a restraining hand on those inclined to hasten too fast.

This is an edited extract from The First Albanese Government, edited by John Hawkins, Michelle Grattan and John Halligan (New South), published on February 1.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

A few thousand years ago, sugar was unknown in the western world. Sugarcane, a tall grass first domesticated in New Guinea around 6000BC, was initially chewed for its sweet juice rather than crystallised. By around 500BC, methods to boil sugarcane juice into crystals was first developed in India.

One of the earliest references to sugar we have dates to 510BC, when Emperor Darius I of what was then Persia invaded India. There he found “the reed which gives honey without bees”.

Knowledge of sugar-making spread west to Persia, then across the Islamic world after the 7th century AD. Sugar reached medieval Europe only via trade routes. It was extremely expensive and used more like a spice. Indeed, in the 11th century Crusaders returning home talked of how pleasant this “new spice” was.

It was the supply potential of this “new spice” in the early 16th century that encouraged Portuguese entrepreneurs to export enslaved people to newly discovered Brazil. There, they rapidly started growing highly profitable sugar cane crops. By the 1680s, the Dutch, English and French all had their own sugar plantations with enslaved colonies in the Caribbean.

In the 18th century, the increasing popularity of tea and coffee led to the widespread adoption of sugar as a sweetener. In 1874, prime-minister William Gladstone abolished a 34% tax on sugar to ease the costs of basic food for workers. Cheap jam (one-third fruit pulp to two-thirds sugar) began to appear on the table of every working-class household. The growing demand for sugar in Britain and Europe encouraged further growth and profit, earning the name “white gold”.

Britain’s per capita sugar consumption skyrocketed from four pounds in 1704 to 90 pounds by 1901. While slavery was eventually abolished, the supply of cheap labour was sustained by new flows of indentured workers from India, Africa and China.

Britain’s naval blockade of Napoleonic France at the start of the 19th century prodded the French to seek an alternative to Caribbean sugar supplies. It gave birth to the European sugar beet industry.

Sugar beet is a biennial root crop grown for its high sucrose content, which is extracted to produce table sugar. The 20th century has seen this traditionally heavily subsidised and tariff-protected industry grow to produce approximately 50% of Europe’s sugar. This includes the UK’s consumption, which is now around 2 million tons of beet (60%) and cane sugar (40%) annually.

Delights and dangers

In 1886, Atlanta’s prohibition laws forced the businessman and chemist John Pemberton to reformulate his popular drink, Pemberton’s Tonic French Wine Coca. He replaced the alcohol with a 15% sugar syrup and added citric acid. His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, chose a new name for the drink after its main ingredients – cocaine leaves and kola nuts – and created the Coca-Cola trademark in the flowing script we know today.

In 1879, Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter invented the world’s first commercial milk chocolate using sweetened condensed milk developed by his neighbour, Henri Nestlé. Milk chocolate, which contains about 50-52 grams of sugar per 100 grams, has now become a global favourite for its sweet taste and creamy texture.

Chocolate and cola have since solidified their status as global staples in the realm of fizzy drinks and sweet treats and have become essential indulgences for people worldwide.

In 1961, an American epidemiologist Ancel Keys appeared on the cover of Time magazine for his “diet-heart hypothesis”. Through his “seven countries” study, he found an association between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol and heart disease. Keys remarked: “People should know the facts. Then, if they want to eat themselves to death, let them.”

With competing scientific advice John Yudkin, founder of the nutrition department at Queen’s College, published an article in the Lancet. He argued that international comparisons do not support the claim that total or animal fat is the main cause of coronary thrombosis, highlighting that sugar intake has a stronger correlation with heart disease.

He published his book, Pure, White and Deadly, in 1972. It highlighted the evidence linking sugar consumption to increased coronary thrombosis and its involvement in dental caries, obesity, diabetes and liver disease. He ominously noted: “If only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed about any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.”

The British Sugar Bureau dismissed Yudkin’s claims about sugar as “emotional assertions”, and the World Sugar Research Organisation called his book “science fiction”. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sugar industry promoted sugar as an appetite suppressant and funded research that downplayed the risks of sucrose, while emphasising dietary fat as the primary driver of coronary heart disease.

Scientific debate over the relative health effects of sugar and fat continued for decades. In the meantime, governments began publishing dietary guidelines advising people to eat less saturated fats and high-cholesterol foods. An unavoidable consequence of this was that people began eating more carbohydrates and sugar instead.

Official dietary guidelines did not begin to clearly acknowledge the health risks of excessive sugar consumption until much later, as evidence accumulated toward the end of the 20th century.

In my new book, Food and Us: the Incredible Story of How Food Shapes Humanity I explore the fact that sugar is a relatively new addition to our diet. In just a short period of 300 years, or 0.0001% of our food evolution, sugar has become ubiquitous in our food supply. It has even evolved its own terms of endearment and affection for people, such as sugar, honey and sweetheart.

However, the global addiction to sugar poses significant and interconnected challenges for public health, the economy, society and the environment. The pervasive nature of sugar in processed foods, combined with its effects on the brain’s reward system, creates a cycle of dependency that is driving a worldwide crisis of diet-related diseases and straining health systems.

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Seamus Higgins, Associate Professor Food Process Engineering, Chemical & Environmental Engineering, University of Nottingham

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

People living on the low-lying shores of the Bristol Channel and Severn estuary began their day like any other on January 30 1607. The weather was calm. The sky was bright.

Then, suddenly, the sea rose without warning. Water came racing inland, tearing across fields and villages, sweeping away the homes, livestock and people in its path.

By the end of the day, thousands of acres were underwater. As many as 2,000 people may have died. It was, quite possibly, the deadliest sudden natural disaster to hit Britain in 500 years.

More than four centuries later, the flood of 1607 still raises a troubling question. What, exactly, caused it?

Most early explanations blamed an exceptional storm. But when my colleague and I began examining the historical evidence more closely in 2002, we became less certain that this was the full picture. For one, eyewitness accounts tell a more unsettling story.

The flood struck on January 30 1607 – or January 20 1606, according to the old Julian calendar, which was still in use at that time. The flood affected coastal communities across south Wales, Somerset, Gloucestershire and Devon, inundating some areas several miles inland. People at the time were no strangers to storms or high tides – but this was different.

Churches were inundated. Entire villages vanished. Vast stretches of farmland were ruined by saltwater, leaving communities facing hunger as well as grief. Memorial plaques in local churches and parish documents still mark the scale of the catastrophe.

Much of what we know about how the event unfolded comes from chapbooks, which were cheaply printed pamphlets sold in the early 17th century. These accounts describe not just the damage, but the terrifying speed and character of the water itself.

One such pamphlet, God’s Warning to His People of England, describes a calm morning suddenly interrupted by what witnesses saw approaching from the sea:

Upon Tuesday 20 January 1606 there happened such an overflowing of waters … the like never in the memory of man hath been seen or heard of. For about nine of the morning, many of the inhabitants of these countreys … perceive afar off huge and mighty hilles of water tombling over one another, in such sort as if the greatest mountains in the world had overwhelmed the lowe villages or marshy grounds.

Our interest in the event arose from reading that account. It gives a specific time for the inundation – around nine in the morning – and emphasises the fair weather and sudden arrival of the floodwaters.

From a geographer’s perspective, this description is striking. Sudden onset, wave-like forms and an absence of storm conditions are not typical of storm surges. To us, the language was reminiscent of eyewitness accounts of tsunamis elsewhere in the world. This suggested a tsunami origin for the flood should be evaluated.

Until the early 2000s, few researchers seriously questioned the storm-surge explanation. But as we revisited the historical sources, we began to ask whether the physical landscape might also preserve clues to what happened in 1607. If an extreme marine inundation had struck the coast at that time, it may have left geological evidence behind.

In several locations around the estuary, we identified a suite of features with a chronological link to the early 17th century: the erosion of two spurs of land that previously jutted out into the estuary, the removal of almost all fringing salt marsh deposits, and the occurrence of sand layers in otherwise muddy deposits

These features point to a high-energy event. The question was what kind?

Testing the theory

To explore this further, we undertook a programme of fieldwork in 2004. We examined sand layers and noted signatures of tsunami impact such as coastal erosion, and analysed the movement of large boulders along the shoreline. Boulder transport is particularly useful, as it allows estimates of the wave heights needed to move them.

Some fieldwork was filmed for a BBC documentary broadcast in April 2005, which featured other colleagues too. It included an argument for a storm, but also another suggesting it isn’t fanciful to consider that an offshore earthquake provided the trigger.

Our results were published in 2007, coincidentally the 400th anniversary of the flood. In parallel, colleagues published a compelling model supporting a storm surge. The scientific debate, rather than being resolved, intensified.

An updating of wave heights based on boulder data using refined formula was published in 2021, suggesting a minimum tsunami wave height of 4.2 metres is required to explain the coastal features – whereas, according to the calculations, storm waves of over 16 metres would be required. This is perhaps unlikely within the relatively sheltered Severn estuary.

The low-lying coasts around the Bristol Channel remain vulnerable to flooding. Storm surges occur regularly, though usually with more limited effects. Climate change is now increasing the risk through rising sea levels and more intense weather systems.

Tsunamis, by contrast, are rare. A report by the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs found it unlikely that the 1607 flood may have been caused by one. However, it also noted that offshore southwest Britain is among the more credible locations for a future tsunami, triggered by seismic activity or submarine landslides.

This distinction matters. Storm surges can usually be forecast. Tsunamis may arrive with little or no warning.

Scholarly and public interest in the flood has not waned. In November 2024, a Channel 5 documentary brought together several strands of recent research, concluding that the jury is still out on the flood’s cause.

That uncertainty should not be seen as a failure. Evaluating competing explanations is essential when trying to understand extreme events in the past – especially when those events have implications for present-day risk.

Whether the flood of 1607 was driven by storm winds, unusual tides or waves generated far offshore, its lesson is clear. Coastal societies ignore rare disasters at their peril.

The sea has come in before. And it will do so again.

Simon Haslett, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Physical Geography, Bath Spa University; Swansea University

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

Imagine a city that thrived for thousands of years, its streets alive with workshops, markets and the laughter of children, yet that is remembered for a single night of fire. That city is Troy.

Long before Homer’s epics immortalised its fall, Troy was a place of everyday life. Potters shaped jars and bowls destined to travel far beyond the settlement itself, moving through wide horizons of exchange and connection.

Bronze tools rang in busy workshops. Traders called across the marketplace and children chased one another along sun‑warmed footpaths. This was the real heartbeat of Troy – the story history has forgotten.

Homer’s late eighth‑century BC epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, fixed powerful images in western cultural memory: heroes clashing, a wooden horse dragged through city gates, flames licking the night sky. Yet this dramatic ending hides a far longer, far more remarkable story: centuries of cooperation embedded in everyday social organisation. A story we might call the Trojan peace.

This selective memory is not unique to Troy. Across history, spectacular collapses dominate how we imagine the past: Rome burning in AD64, Carthage razed in 146BC and the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán falling in AD1521. Sudden catastrophe is vivid and memorable. The slow, fragile work of maintaining stability is easier to overlook.

The Trojan peace was not the absence of tension or inequality. It was the everyday ability to manage them without society breaking apart, the capacity to absorb pressure through routine cooperation rather than dramatic intervention.

When catastrophe outshines stability

Archaeology often speaks loudest when something goes catastrophically wrong. Fires preserve. Ruins cling to the soil like charcoal fingerprints. Peace, by contrast, leaves no single dramatic moment to anchor it.

Its traces survive in the ordinary: footpaths worn smooth by generations of feet; jars repaired, reused and handled for decades, some still bearing the drilled holes of ancient mending. These humble remnants form the true architecture of long‑term stability.

Troy is a textbook example. Archaeologists have identified nine major layers at the site, some of which are associated with substantial architectural reorganisation. But that isn’t evidence of destruction. Rather it simply reflects the everyday reality of a settlement’s history: building, use, maintenance or levelling, rebuilding and repetition.

Instead, I argue that Troy’s archaeological record reveals centuries of architectural continuity, stable coastal occupation and trade networks stretching from Mesopotamia to the Aegean and the Balkans – a geography of connection rather than conflict.

The only evidence for truly massive destruction that can be identified dates to around 2350BC. Against the broader archaeological backdrop, this stands out as a rare, fiery rupture – one dramatic episode within a much longer pattern of recovery and continuity.

Whether sparked by conflict, social unrest or an accident, it interrupted only briefly the long continuity of daily life – more than a thousand years before the events portrayed by the poet Homer in his tale of the Trojan war were supposed to have taken place.

But what actually held Troy together for so long? During the third and second millennia BC, Troy was a modest but highly connected coastal hub, thriving through exchange, craft specialisation, shared material traditions and the steady movement of ideas and goods.

The real drivers of Troy’s development were households, traders and craftspeople. Their lives depended on coordination and reciprocity: managing water and farmland, organising production, securing vital resources such as bronze and negotiating movement along the coast. In modern terms, peace was work, negotiated daily, maintained collectively and never guaranteed.

When crises arose, the community adapted. Labour was reorganised, resources redistributed, routines adjusted. Stability was restored not through force, but through collective problem solving embedded in everyday practice.

This was not a utopia. Troy’s stability was constrained by environmental limits, population pressure and finite resources. A successful trading season could bring prosperity; a failed harvest could strain systems quickly. Peace was never about eliminating conflict, but about absorbing pressure without collapse.

Archaeologically, this long-term balance appears as persistence: settlement layouts maintained across generations, skills refined and passed down, and gradual expansion from the citadel into what would later become the lower town. These developments depended on negotiation and cooperation, not conquest, revealing practical mechanisms of peace in the bronze age.

Why we remember the war

Stories favour rupture over routine. Homer’s Iliad was never a historical account of the bronze age, but a poetic reflection of heroism, morality, power and loss. The long, quiet centuries of cooperation before and after were too distant – and too subtle – to dramatise.

Modern archaeology has often followed the same gravitational pull. Excavations at Troy began with the explicit aim of locating the battlefield of the Trojan war. Even as scholarship moved on, the story of war continued to dominate the public imagination. War offers a clear narrative. Peace leaves behind complexity.

Reexamining Troy through the lens of peace shifts attention away from moments of destruction and towards centuries of continuity. Archaeology shows how communities without states, armies, or written law sustained stability through everyday practices of cooperation. What kept Troy going was not grand strategy, but the quiet work of living together, generation after generation.

The real miracle of Troy was not how it fell – but for how long it endured. Rethinking the cherished narrative of the Trojan war reminds us that lasting peace is built not in dramatic moments, but through the persistent, creative efforts of ordinary people.

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Stephan Blum, Research Associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen

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

A ziggurat (also spelled ziqqurat) was a raised platform with four sloping sides that looked like a tiered pyramid.

Ziggurats were common in ancient Mesopotamia (roughly modern Iraq) from around 4,000 to 500 BCE.

Unlike the Egyptian pyramids, they were not places of royal burials, but temples dedicated to the patron deity of a city.

How were they made?

Stone was relatively rare in Mesopotamia, so ziggurats were mainly made of sun-dried mudbricks coated with limestone and bitumen (a sticky, tar-like substance).

Their sides were decorated with grooved stripes and were often plastered with lime mortar or gypsum and glazed in various colours.

Unlike the pyramids, they had no internal chambers. The actual shrine was at the top of the structure where the god resided. It was accessible by steps and was believed to be a meeting point between heaven and earth.

Ziggurats towered over the centre of ancient Mesopotamian cities; as archaeological evidence indicates, they were typically built next to the palace or the temple of a city’s patron god to stress the role of the god in supporting the king.

How the Anu ziggurat became the White Temple

The Anu ziggurat, the oldest known, was built at Uruk (modern-day Warka, about 250 kilometres south of Baghdad) by the Sumerians around 4,000 BCE. (The Sumerians were an ancient people, among the first known to have established cities, who lived roughly in the area of modern Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.)

This ziggurat was dedicated to Anu, their sky god. Sometime between 3,500 and 3,000 BCE, the so-called White Temple was built on top of it.

The White Temple, approximately 12 metres high, was so named because it was entirely whitewashed inside and out. It must have shone dazzlingly in the sun.
The Sumerian culture was eventually taken over by the Akkadian Empire, followed by the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires. Throughout the rise and fall of empires, ziggurats continued to be built in the Ancient Near East.

In fact, the word ziggurat comes from the Akkadian verb zaqâru, meaning “to build high”.

Other famous ziggurats

Assyrian kings built an impressive ziggurat in their capital, Nimrud (about 30 kilometres south of Mosul). This ziggurat was dedicated to Ninurta, a Sumerian and Akkadian god of war and victory.

Ninurta’s father, the god Enlil, was worshipped at the ziggurat of the sacred city Nippur, in modern-day Iraq.

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II dedicated the ziggurat Etemenanki to the Babylonian king of gods, Marduk. The name Etemenanki means the Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.

Etemenanki was located north of a different temple called the Esagil, which was Marduk’s main temple in Babylon.

Etemenanki likely inspired the story of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament. Genesis 11 refers to a “tower” built of mud bricks instead of stone, which was intended to reach the heavens.

The building, perceived as an act of human pride, angered God, who caused the people to speak different languages and scattered them across the Earth.

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Marduk often chose a woman to spend the night with him in the top-most shrine of his ziggurat.

The text has been often understood to refer to a “sacred marriage” rite involving the sexual union of a woman with the god.

However, it seems more likely to have been an incubation rite, when the god’s will is revealed to someone sleeping in a sacred place.

Constant preservation

Because of the relative lack of durability of mud bricks, ziggurats required constant preservation.

Etemenanki in Babylon had to be rebuilt several times until Alexander the Great ordered his soldiers to destroy it in 323 BCE so as to rebuild it from scratch.

However, Alexander’s premature death (historians continue to debate what he died of) meant the task had to be completed by his successors. But whether the rebuilding task was ever completed is uncertain.

Better preserved ziggurats include the Ziggurat of Ur (in the region of modern-day Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq). The powerful king, Ur-Nammu, dedicated this ziggurat to the moon god, Nanna or Sîn, around 2100 BCE.

Another example is the ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil in modern Iran, which was built around 1250 BCE. It now stands only 24.5 metres tall, instead of the original estimated 53 metres.

A lasting influence on architecture

Ziggurats influenced architecture long after their demise, including the new tiered “skyscrapers” of the art deco era in the 20th century.

Modern ziggurats ended up dotting the New York skyline.

And, if you look closely, you’ll see that there’s a fair amount of ziggurat about the Empire State Building.

These modern examples serve as a fascinating reminder of a design and construction language that goes back to the Middle East over six millennia ago.

Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Macquarie University and Michael B. Charles, Associate Professor, Management Discipline, Faculty of Business, Arts and Law, Southern Cross University

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

What will we see in the southern sky in 2026? A total eclipse of the Moon (at a convenient time), a blue Moon and a supermoon, the two brightest planets close together, and Jupiter disappearing behind the Moon in the daytime.

All except one of these events can be seen with the unaided eye, even in light-polluted cities.

In addition to these special events, we will see the annual procession of meteor showers and the nightly parade of constellations. Though best seen from a dark country location, the most interesting of these can still be seen from cities.

Here are some of the year’s highlights.

March, May and December: the Moon

An eclipse of the Moon (or lunar eclipse) will take place on the evening of Tuesday March 3. During the eclipse, the full Moon moves into the shadow of Earth and is likely to turn a red or coppery colour.

This is because sunlight is bent or refracted by Earth’s atmosphere onto the Moon. The bent light is red – it is the glow of sunrises and sunsets from around the globe.

Lunar eclipses are safe to watch with the unaided eye and offer a good opportunity for nighttime photography. For successful images, the camera or phone needs to be able to take timed exposures and should be firmly supported on a tripod or similar.

Seen from Australia’s south-east, totality (when the Moon is completely obscured) will occur between 10:04pm and 11:03pm local time. From Brisbane the times are an hour earlier, while from Perth the times are three hours earlier. From Aotearoa New Zealand totality will begin just after midnight.

Another lunar event is a “blue Moon” on Sunday May 31. This is a name sometimes given to the second full Moon in a single calendar month. This happens, on average, once every two or three years.

The final Moon event is a “supermoon” on Christmas eve, Thursday December 24. This occurs when a full Moon falls when the Moon is at the closest point to Earth in its monthly orbit.

This means the full Moon appears a little larger than usual. The supermoon looks most spectacular at moonrise, as an illusion in our brains magnifies the effect when the Moon is close to the horizon.

April, June and November: planets

Before dawn on the mornings of April 19–22, the planets Mercury, Mars and Saturn will form a tight bunch in the sky. Look towards the east.

On the evenings of Tuesday June 9 and Wednesday June 10, the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, pass within three moon-widths of each other from our point of view.

On Tuesday November 3, the crescent Moon will pass in front of Jupiter. Although this happens during the day, it will be visible with a pair of binoculars. (Note: do not point binoculars at the Sun! Children must be fully supervised.)

Times vary across Australia and New Zealand. From Sydney, the bright edge of the Moon covers Jupiter at 10:40am and Jupiter reappears at the dark edge at 11:39am.

December: meteor shower

Before dawn on mornings in mid-December, there is a favourable opportunity to view the Geminid meteor shower, one of the best such showers during the year. The shower occurs when the Earth runs into a stream of dust left behind by a rocky asteroid called Phaethon.

As the dust particles burn up in the atmosphere 100km or so above our heads, brief streaks of light called meteors can be seen. This year there is a good chance to see them, as the Moon will not brighten the sky.

This year, the peak of the shower is predicted for the early morning of Tuesday December 15. To see the meteors, try to find the darkest spot you can, and look towards the north as shown below. The meteors will appear to radiate from a point near Castor, in the Gemini constellation.

January and December: Taurus

Many of the constellations in the European tradition, visible from the northern hemisphere, were named in ancient times. Explorers and astronomers venturing south of the equator in the 18th century named most of the rest.

Previously, I have discussed the well-known constellations Orion and Scorpius and the Southern Cross and Sagittarius. For 2026, I want to talk about the zodiac constellation of Taurus, the Bull.

The best way to find Taurus is to extend a line downwards from the three stars of Orion’s belt until you reach a bright reddish star called Aldebaran.

Aldebaran sits in an inverted V-shaped group of stars. This is the Bull’s head, upside down for us as it was named in the northern hemisphere. The other stars in the group are part of a cluster called the Hyades.

Another cluster in Taurus is the Pleiades. This is named the Seven Sisters, not just in the European tradition, but by cultures around the world, including First Nations people of Australia.

With the unaided eye, most people can only see six stars in this compact cluster, but hundreds can been seen through a telescope. In 2025 astronomers found the Pleiades likely contains 20 times as many stars as previously thought.

The information in this article comes from the 2026 Australasian Sky Guide. The guide has monthly star maps and more information to help with viewing and enjoying the night sky from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Nick Lomb, Adjunct Professor, Centre for Astrophysics, University of Southern Queensland

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

While the beach and swimming culture might feel like an intrinsic part of “Australianness”, this hasn’t always been the case. For many of us, swimming lessons, school swimming carnivals and weekends at the beach are defining childhood memories.

That deep connection to beach swimming helps explain why our responses to the Sydney region’s recent shark attacks and health concerns over South Australia’s algal bloom crisis feel like a form of collective grieving.

Swimming at the beach is seen as healing. It brings us together and connects people to the natural world. Yet our apparently intrinsic swimming identity is something that’s emerged over time. Our attitudes to swimming and beach-going have shifted according to social values and politics.

The “beach bodies” we celebrate as healthy and desirable would have been unthinkable in the 19th century, when sea bathing was a furtive, private affair for colonial Australians. Daytime public bathing was widely banned until around the early 1900s, when restrictions began to lift. And even when we did eventually hold swimming races, our first swimmers were hardly Olympic standard.

Meanwhile, a recent study by Royal Surf Lifesaving Australia warns that swimming culture might be on the retreat: fewer children are competing in swimming carnivals, or even have competence in the water. Drowning deaths increased last summer and swimming ability is falling “below minimum standards”, the report argues: 48% of Year 6 students and 84% of year 10 students are not meeting expected benchmarks for their age.

My research shows that Australia’s swimming culture didn’t evolve by accident: it was actively nurtured by swimming advocates and public education programs. A concerted public effort will be required to boost swimming skills and water safety once more.

Danger, modesty and bans

While most settler-colonial Australian coast dwellers in the 19th century viewed ocean bathing as essential for hygiene, being in the water also channelled all sorts of panics.

The ocean was a place where you drowned when ships went down, got taken by sharks, or simply succumbed to its depths. The beach was perilous. It took people.

Fear of the water also had a moral element. Bathing was necessary, but done in private and with modesty.

The swimming and diving feats of First Nations men and women were frequently commented on by colonists and observers. Aboriginal people “are bold and surprisingly expert, both in swimming and diving”, wrote William Govett in the Saturday Magazine in 1836.

In 1843, the missionary James Backhouse described Aboriginal women in Lutruwita (Tasmania) diving for crayfish “often using the long stems of the kelp to enable them to reach the bottom; these they handle as dextrously as a sailor would a rope in descending”.

And in Lieutenant William Dawes’ famous Dharug wordlist from 1790-91, we get the term “bóg’i” – to bathe or swim. (It’s a word still used today: “bogey holes” are features at Bronte Beach and Newcastle, where people can safely enjoy an ocean dip.)

But in 1810, Governor Lachlan Macquarie banned public bathing in and around Sydney Cove. The colonial bathing prohibition was extended in 1838 to all towns in New South Wales, “for the maintenance of the public peace and good order”. It was incorporated into the Colony’s Police Act:

it shall not be lawful for any person to bathe near to or within view of any public wharf quay bridge street road or other place of public resort within the limits of any of the towns aforesaid between the hours of six o'clock in the morning and eight in the evening.

To avoid prosecution, women and men discretely bathed behind privacy screens and segregated areas, away from public gaze, or at dawn and dusk, until the daytime bathing bans were lifted in the early decades of the 1900s.

Some people in the colonies could and did swim. Swimming races and demonstrations were held in places designated for segregated swimming, like Robinson’s Baths in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo Bay, or St Kilda Baths in Melbourne, during the middle decades of the 1800s.

Yet these carnivals were largely for entertainment and betting, rather than universal rites of passage. And mixed bathing continued to be scorned and policed until the turn of the 20th century.

During one Sydney competition in 1852, only two men entered the 100-yard race, and neither contestant swam overarm until the final few metres of the race, briefly accelerating their more sedate sidestroke.

Over the course of the 1800s, values about morality and modesty gradually shifted as views around gender, health and fitness changed – along with ideas about leisure and pleasure.

An 1860 news story about swimming matches in Port Phillip Bay touted the potential of swimming to strengthen both communities and physical bodies. “It is gratifying to see so many youngsters good swimmers,” the Melbourne Argus reported.

There was a significant racial element in all this, too, as the work of historians Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds and others explores. The colonies were anxious about their geographical isolation from Britain and obsessed with how their citizens might “measure up”.

At a time when ideas about bodily vigour and good health were growing, swimming was also viewed as a form of exercise acceptable for women. But swimming didn’t just promote physical fitness. Knowing how to swim was essential for public safety, especially for the Empire’s youngest subjects.

“The accidents that so often occur during the summer season would be reduced to a minimum, if women would but learn to swim,” one 1876 article from the Illustrated Sydney News insisted.

Swim safety and beach bodies

By the late 1890s, school swimming lessons had begun in Victoria and New South Wales. Amateur swimming associations were established around the country during this period. They advocated for the construction of public baths and the provision of lessons, along with that now famous rite of passage, the swimming carnival.

Bathing – once furtive and modest – was increasingly replaced with public swimming, for women and men. The more popular swimming became, the more people visited the beach.

In turn, people who visited the beach to swim, rather than stroll or splash up to their knees, further nibbled at 19th-century Victorian strictures of decorum. By the end of the 19th century, beach bodies were becoming markers of good health and virtue, rather than something to hide.

Surf life saving clubs

As the popularity of beach swimming grew, however, its physical dangers were thrown into ever sharper relief. Reports of tragic deaths were regular news right around the country.

Children were especially vulnerable. Newspapers reported stories like the drowning death of young Leslie Mitchell in December 1900. Seen wading knee-deep at St Kilda beach, he was found face down in the water only minutes later.

As accidents mounted, notes historian Caroline Ford, civic responses also grew. Many beachside communities established lifesaving clubs, like Bondi (formed in 1907), Cottesloe (in 1909) and Tweed Heads and Coolangatta (in 1911), and provided life-saving equipment like life-rings and surf-lines. There were also government inquiries into beach safety, which recommended funding for public education and surf lifesavers.

The Surf Bathing Association of New South Wales, formed in 1907, soon became the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, and quickly expanded as clubs around the country were created.

The shift from furtive bather to confident beach swimmer reflected changing social attitudes. It also occurred during a critical time of emerging national identity – and federation.

Beach bodies became idealised figures of strength: admirable and desirable, rather than something to be ashamed of. Australian swimmers like Mina Wylie, Andrew “Boy” Charlton, Fanny Durack, and Annette Kellerman, were national heroes and celebrities. They won international races, appeared in variety shows and drew enormous crowds.

While that freedom-loving, strong and capable beach figure celebrated in popular culture at the time might have been bronzed by the sun, it was invariably white. The Immigration Restriction Act was one of the first pieces of federal legislation passed by the new nation in 1901 and it enshrined the White Australia policy.

The beach was a national leveller, of sorts, but only if you were actually welcome to sit on the sand in the first place.

Throughout the 20th century, as swimming became a sign of Australian egalitarianism and physical health, it was also a site of exclusion, as the 1965 Freedom Ride and 2005 Cronulla race riots demonstrate.

Australia’s celebration of beach and swimming culture – in all its complexity – went on to become a defining feature of national identity. And significant efforts supported by governments, surf lifesaving and community groups have attempted to make the beach an inclusive, safe place for everyone.

Ensuring beach safety is an ongoing part of those efforts.

Anna Clark, Professor in Public History, University of Technology Sydney

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

We may not need to completely overhaul our lives to live healthier for longer, according to a large UK-based study. This is welcome news, particularly as many people will already have abandoned their New Year’s resolutions.

The recent study followed around 590,000 people in the UK, with an average age of 64, over an eight-year period. The researchers confirmed earlier findings that healthier lifestyles are associated with lower risk of disease, including dementia, and with living longer in good health and independence.

The authors reported that even very small changes were associated with such benefits. These included around five additional minutes of sleep per night, two extra minutes per day of moderate to vigorous physical activity, and modest improvements in diet. Together, these changes were associated with roughly one additional year of healthy life. “Healthy life” here refers to years lived without major illness or disability that limits daily functioning.

More substantial changes were linked to larger gains. Almost half an hour of extra sleep per night, combined with four additional minutes of exercise per day, which adds up to nearly half an hour of extra activity per week, along with further dietary improvements, was associated with up to four additional healthy years of life.

This matters because, although women live longer on average than men, those extra years are often spent in poorer health, with significant personal and economic costs. Women face a higher risk of dementia, stroke and heart disease at older ages, as well as conditions that lead to vision loss and bone fractures. These illnesses can reduce quality of life and threaten independence.

Lifestyle change may also reduce the risk of early death. The same lifestyle factors examined in this cohort were analysed last year in a separate study, which focused on mortality (the risk of dying).

In that analysis, people who followed healthier lifestyle patterns over an eight-year period had a 10% lower risk of death in that period. The combination of 15 extra minutes of sleep per night, two additional minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day and a healthy diet was linked to a modest reduction in the risk of dying. A much larger reduction of 64% was seen among people who slept between seven and eight hours per night, ate a healthy diet and engaged in between 42 and 103 additional minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week. Importantly, this benefit was only seen when these behaviours occurred together. Diet alone had no measurable effect, for instance.

Strengths and limitations

One of the key strengths of these studies is that they show health benefits at very low thresholds of behaviour change. This reduces the likelihood that the results are driven only by people who are already healthier or more motivated, and makes the findings more applicable to older adults and those with limited capacity to change their routines.

Another strength is the use of objective measurements rather than self-reported data. Physical activity and sleep were measured using wearable devices, rather than relying on participants to estimate their own behaviour. Self-reporting can be unreliable, particularly for people with memory problems, such as those in the early stages of dementia.

However, there are important limitations. The objective measurements were only collected for three to seven days, which may not reflect people’s long-term habits. From personal experience, wearing activity trackers can lead people to exercise more while they are being monitored, but these changes are often short-lived.

In addition, wrist-worn accelerometers estimate sleep and activity based on movement. During deep sleep, people move very little, but lack of movement does not always mean someone is asleep. These devices may therefore not fully capture true sleep patterns or physical activity levels. Other methods, such as thigh-mounted sensors or mattress-based sensors that detect movement during sleep, may provide more accurate assessments.

Despite these issues, objective measurements are generally more reliable than self-report. Still, because behaviour was only measured once, it is unclear whether actual changes in behaviour over time influenced health outcomes. It is also not clear whether the recorded activity reflected leisure-time exercise or physical activity at work, which can have different effects on health.

Dietary information presents another challenge. Diet was self-reported and collected three to nine years before collection of sleep and activity data. Diets often change over time, particularly after diagnoses such as cardiovascular disease, where people may be advised to reduce their cholesterol intake, or in conditions such as dementia, where people may forget to eat. As a result, it is difficult to know whether diet influenced disease risk, or whether emerging disease altered diet, eventually contributing to poor health and earlier death.

There are also broader social factors to consider. Healthy behaviours tend to cluster together and are strongly linked to education and financial security. For example, smoking and having overweight and obesity are closely associated with deprivation and poverty.

Participants in the UK Biobank, a large long-term health research project that collects genetic, lifestyle and health data from hundreds of thousands of UK adults, are generally healthier than the average UK population.

Health research often attracts people who are healthier, better educated and more financially secure. This may reflect both interest in research and having the time and resources to take part in such studies.

Wealth also shapes exposure to risk. People with higher incomes are less likely to live in areas with high levels of pollution and are more likely to have control over their working conditions and finances. Financial stress can affect sleep quality, leading to fatigue and reducing the likelihood of exercising, shopping for fresh food, or preparing healthy meals. Over a lifetime, these factors contribute to poorer health and earlier death.

Although researchers attempted to account for these influences using statistical methods, these are deeply interconnected and difficult to separate. The widening health-wealth gap, with many people now living in severe poverty, highlights the limits of personal responsibility. These structural issues require action from policymakers, rather than placing the burden solely on people who may have very little control over the conditions that shape their health.

Eef Hogervorst, Professor of Biological Psychology, Loughborough University

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

Cancer and Alzheimer’s disease are two of the most feared diagnoses in medicine, but they rarely strike the same person. For years, epidemiologists have noticed that people with cancer seem less likely to develop Alzheimer’s, and those with Alzheimer’s are less likely to get cancer, but nobody could explain why.

A new study in mice suggests a surprising possibility: certain cancers may actually send a protective signal to the brain that helps clear away the toxic protein clumps linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s is characterised by sticky deposits of a protein called amyloid beta that build up between nerve cells in the brain. These clumps, or plaques, interfere with communication between nerve cells and trigger inflammation and damage that slowly erodes memory and thinking.

In the new study, scientists implanted human lung, prostate and colon tumours under the skin of mice bred to develop Alzheimer‑like amyloid plaques. Left alone, these animals reliably develop dense clumps of amyloid beta in their brains as they age, mirroring a key feature of the human disease.

But when the mice carried tumours, their brains stopped accumulating the usual plaques. In some experiments, the animals’ memory also improved compared with Alzheimer‑model mice without tumours, suggesting that the change was not just visible under the microscope.

The team traced this effect to a protein called cystatin‑C that was being pumped out by the tumours into the bloodstream. The new study suggests that, at least in mice, cystatin‑C released by tumours can cross the blood–brain barrier – the usually tight border that shields the brain from many substances in the circulation.

Once inside the brain, cystatin‑C appears to latch on to small clusters of amyloid beta and mark them for destruction by the brain’s resident immune cells, called microglia. These cells act as the brain’s clean‑up crew, constantly patrolling for debris and misfolded proteins.

In Alzheimer’s, microglia seem to fall behind, allowing amyloid beta to accumulate and harden into plaques. In the tumour‑bearing mice, cystatin‑C activated a sensor on microglia known as Trem2, effectively switching them into a more aggressive, plaque‑clearing state.

Surprising trade-offs

At first glance, the idea that a cancer could “help” protect the brain from dementia sounds almost perverse. Yet biology often works through trade-offs, where a process that is harmful in one context can be beneficial in another.

In this case, the tumour’s secretion of cystatin‑C may be a side‑effect of its own biology that happens to have a useful consequence for the brain’s ability to handle misfolded proteins. It does not mean that having cancer is good, but it does reveal a pathway that scientists might be able to harness more safely.

The study slots into a growing body of research suggesting that the relationship between cancer and neurodegenerative diseases is more than a statistical quirk. Large population studies have reported that people with Alzheimer’s are significantly less likely to be diagnosed with cancer, and vice versa, even after accounting for age and other health factors.

This has led to the idea of a biological seesaw, where mechanisms that drive cells towards survival and growth, as in cancer, may push them away from the pathways that lead to brain degeneration. The cystatin‑C story adds a physical mechanism to that picture.

However, the research is in mice, not humans, and that distinction matters. Mouse models of Alzheimer’s capture some features of the disease, particularly amyloid plaques, but they do not fully reproduce the complexity of human dementia.

We also do not yet know whether human cancers in real patients produce enough cystatin‑C, or send it to the brain in the same way, to have meaningful effects on Alzheimer’s disease risk. Still, the discovery opens intriguing possibilities for future treatment strategies.

One idea is to develop drugs or therapies that mimic the beneficial actions of cystatin‑C without involving a tumour at all. That could mean engineered versions of the protein designed to bind amyloid beta more effectively, or molecules that activate the same pathway in microglia to boost their clean‑up capacity.

The research also highlights how interconnected diseases can be, even when they affect very different organs. A tumour growing in the lung or colon might seem far removed from the slow build up of protein deposits in the brain, yet molecules released by that tumour can travel through the bloodstream, cross protective barriers and change the behaviour of brain cells.

For people living with cancer or caring for someone with Alzheimer’s today, this work will not change treatment immediately. But the study does offer a more hopeful message: by studying even grim diseases like cancer in depth, scientists can stumble on unexpected insights that point towards new ways to keep the brain healthy in later life.

Perhaps the most striking lesson is that the body’s defences and failures are rarely simple. A protein that contributes to disease in one organ may be used as a clean‑up tool in another, and by understanding these tricks, researchers may be able to use them safely to help protect the ageing human brain.

Justin Stebbing, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

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

I recently watched a participant at a wine tasting freeze when asked for their opinion. “It’s … nice?” they ventured, clearly wanting to say more but lacking the specific vocabulary to do so.

The sommelier quickly intervened, noting the wine was “quite elegant, with beautiful structure.” The participant simply nodded, and the conversation ended.

Wine is a multi-billion-dollar export commodity, yet industry “winespeak” can actually stop people feeling they can join in conversations about wine. And often words can get lost in translation – or mean something very different – in fast-growing wine markets such as China, Vietnam and Thailand.

My new research systematically reviewed 77 studies on wine language and metaphor. Building on my earlier research tracking how wine metaphors evolve, it reveals a surprising disconnect: the language used to taste and talk about wine does not travel across cultures as smoothly as the industry assumes.

This matters for the wine industry, because wine descriptions directly influence purchasing decisions and overall enjoyment.

Images in English that don’t travel

The problem is not the use of metaphor itself. In their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue metaphors are essential cognitive tools we use every day, often without even noticing.

When we say a wine has “body” or “backbone,” we draw on our intimate knowledge of physical experience to make sense of taste and texture. This is how human language works.

The problem is when metaphors fail to travel. Consider “body,” a fundamental concept in English-speaking wine cultures when talking about weight and mouthfeel.

Research shows even native English speakers interpret “body” differently. Some believe it refers to flavour, others to texture, still others to alcohol content.

When translated where the word lacks the same associations, confusion multiplies. In Dutch, German, and Hungarian, literal translations (“lichaam”, “Körper”, “test”) trigger awkward anatomical associations. What sounds natural in English reads as bizarre in translation.

The enigma of ‘elegance’

“Elegance” presents a similar challenge. Wine experts across cultures share a core understanding – that a wine is smooth, balanced, refined, or complex. Yet cultural associations can vary.

In Chinese wine reviews, elegance is expressed through mírén (迷人), meaning “charming”, and nèiliǎn (內斂), meaning “introverted”. These are social-aesthetic metaphors that activate entirely different cultural scripts.

This is significant, because wine is what’s called an “experience good”. You cannot judge taste or quality until after you purchase. Consumers rely on descriptions to signal what they are buying.

When metaphors don’t align culturally, the industry is not just failing to communicate but actively eroding people’s trust.

Why some words affect wine ratings

The wine world’s most widespread linguistic habit is anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics.

Industry reviews routinely characterise wines as “shy,” “honest,” or “aggressive”. This is not decorative language; it is cognitive scaffolding.

Describing wine as a person helps us communicate complex sensory perceptions by drawing on our personal experience of human behaviour and emotion.

However, these particular metaphors can carry cultural baggage. Research suggests that wines labelled with feminine terms (such as “delicate” or “elegant”) are perceived as hedonistic products meant for quick consumption, leading consumers to believe they decline at a younger age.

Conversely, wines with masculine descriptors (“powerful”, “bold”) are linked to ageing potential, and receive higher quality ratings.

Although these gendered metaphors might not always hit the price tag directly, they can fundamentally alter if and when a consumer decides to drink the bottle.

Creating better metaphors

As global wine trade increases, industry is eager to connect with new consumers in emerging markets. Yet they often do so using vocabulary rooted in European traditions and Western thinking that do not communicate clearly to international audiences.

Wine marketers find themselves caught between traditional wine language maintaining prestige and authority, and pressure to create new metaphors resonating globally.

The solution is not to stop using metaphors to describe wine – that would be impossible. The question is how metaphors can work inclusively across cultures, rather than carrying cultural baggage that can lead to bias and market undervaluation.

My research suggests a need to rethink how we communicate about wine. This could include writing tasting notes that incorporate more universally understood sensory cues and culturally consistent evaluative language, in addition to traditional expert vocabulary.

Without deliberate attention to how metaphors travel, or fail to travel, across cultures, the gap between expert “winespeak” and consumer understanding will only widen. The industry is not building a Tower of Babel through metaphor itself, but through the assumption that everyone speaks the same metaphorical language.

Allison Creed, Lecturer and Curriculum Designer, Cognitive Linguistics, The University of Melbourne

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

Noise was first considered a public health issue in interwar Britain – called the “age of noise” by the author and essayist Aldous Huxley. In this era, the proliferation of mechanical sounds, particularly the rumble of road and air traffic, the blare of loudspeakers and the rising decibels of industry, caused anxiety about the health of the nation’s minds and bodies.

Interwar writers, such as Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Jean Rhys, tuned in to the din. Their fiction is not just an archive of past sound-worlds but also the place where sound became noise and vice versa. As sound historian James Mansell has argued: “Noise was not just representative of the modern; it was modernity manifested in audible form.”

We now have more data and scientific evidence on the effects of environmental noise. The World Health Organization recognises noise, particularly from road, rail and air traffic, as one of the top environmental health hazards, second only to air pollution.

In the interwar period, without comprehensive data on noise and health, early campaigners relied on narrative. They created a particular story about noise and nerves to galvanise the public into keeping it down.

In 1933, the first significant UK noise abatement organisation, the Anti-Noise League, was founded by physician Thomas Horder. The league consisted of doctors, psychologists, physicists, engineers and acousticians (physicists concerned with the properties of sound) who lobbied government for a legislative framework around noise.

They sought to educate the public on the dangers of needless noise through exhibitions, publications and their magazine, Quiet.

Their campaigns drew attention to the very real health effects of environmental noise. But they also saw noise as waste: something to be eliminated in the pursuit of a maximally productive and efficient citizenry.

They drew on ideas of Britishness associated with what they called “acoustic civilisation” (or teaching the nation to be quieter) and “intelligent” behaviour to enact a programme of noise reduction as sonic nationalism.

Noise in modernist fiction

This interwar preoccupation with unwanted sound is also a sonic legacy of the first world war. Exposure to the deafening din of artillery, exploding shells and grenades caused catastrophic auditory injury. So much so, that the din was associated with loss of life and the devastating effects of shell shock.

The extreme noise of warfare also pushed doctors and psychologists to study how sound affects health. This work continued into the 1930s through government-backed bodies such as the Industrial Health Research Board. As a result, people in the interwar years became much more aware that the everyday sounds of machines and traffic could also be harmful.

But it wasn’t only doctors and acousticians who wrote about noise. Authors such as Rebecca West and H.G. Wells worked with the Anti-Noise League, while others, like Winifred Holtby, publicly refuted their findings. But more broadly, in the pages of interwar fiction, modernist writers engaged deeply with the shifting noisescapes around them.

The unprecedented noise levels of the wars, together with the proliferation of sounds in urban and domestic spaces and the auditory training required by new forms of sound technology, caused an attentiveness to sound and hearing. This was harnessed both metaphorically and structurally in the period’s literature.

Modernist writers such as Woolf, Orwell and Rhys listened intently to machines and the sound worlds they created. Once we start to listen for it, noise is everywhere in fiction of the period.

Proletarian factory novels of the 1930s such as Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) or John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936) draw new attention to toxic and harmful high decibel industrial environments.

Interwar novels such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) or George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), each with first world war veteran protagonists, register urban noise via the auditory effects of the conflict zone, or a kind of communal noise sensitivity, as well as through the healing or connective properties of sound. In Dorothy Sayers’ Nine Tailors (1934) a character is (spoiler alert) killed by the sound of a church bell.

Rhys’ short story Let Them Call It Jazz (1962) is set in London in the years following the second world war. It depicts the hostile environment faced by immigrants, such as those arriving from the Caribbean on HMT Empire Windrush, as protagonist Selina Davis is imprisoned for noise disturbance. She has been singing Caribbean folk songs in a “genteel” suburban neighbourhood.

The tale is one of cultural identity, the resistant power of sound, and the politicisation of noise. Black music is a form of sonic resistance; noise is both a silencing strategy for bodies and practices deemed “aberrant” and a resistant practice that exceeds and disrupts exclusionary codes of value and hierarchy.

These works, and many more, demonstrate that modernist writers, if we listen carefully, are theorists of sound who responded in complex ways to their shifting soundscapes. They counter the association of noise with negative affect or “unwanted” excess, by finding aesthetic and political possibility in noise.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, King's College London

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

For much of the 20th century, scientists believed that the adult human brain was largely fixed. According to this view, the brain developed during childhood, settled into a stable form in early adulthood, and then resisted meaningful change for the rest of life.

Today, the concept of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change its structure and function in response to experience, is a central principle of brain science. The brain can change throughout life, but not without limits, not instantly and not effortlessly.

Neuroplasticity therefore reframes the brain as neither rigid nor infinitely malleable, but as a living system shaped by experience, effort and time.

The roots of neuroplasticity can be traced to the mid-20th century. In 1949, psychologist Donald Hebb proposed that connections between neurons, the brain’s nerve cells, become stronger when they are repeatedly activated together.

This principle later became known as “Hebbian learning”. At the time, Hebb’s idea was considered relevant mainly to childhood development. Adult brains were still thought to be relatively unchangeable.

That assumption has since been overturned. From the late 20th century onward, studies showed that adult brains can reorganise in response to learning, changes in sensory input, or physical injury. Sensory changes include alterations in vision, hearing or touch due to training, loss of input or environmental change.

More recently, advances in brain imaging have allowed researchers to observe these changes directly in living people. These studies show that learning alters patterns of brain activity and connectivity across the lifespan.

Neuroplasticity is now understood not as a rare exception, but as a basic property of the nervous system. It operates continuously, within biological limits shaped by age, genetics, prior experience and overall brain health.

How the brain changes

Neuroplasticity involves changes in how existing brain cells communicate with one another.

When you learn a new skill, specific synapses, the tiny junctions where neurons pass signals to each other, become stronger and more efficient. Neural networks, which are groups of neurons that work together, become better organised. Communication between brain regions involved in that skill improves.

At the cellular level, plasticity involves changes in synaptic structure, the release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters, and the sensitivity of receptors that receive those signals. So, it changes how neurons communicate with each other.

In a few areas of the adult brain, particularly the hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory, limited adult neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, also occurs. Although influenced by factors such as stress, sleep and physical activity, its significance in humans is still debated.

Crucially, neuroplasticity is experience-dependent. The brain changes most reliably in response to repeated, focused and meaningful engagement that requires attention, effort and feedback. Passive exposure to information has far less impact.

What strengthens and weakens plasticity

Over the past decade, research has identified several factors that strongly influence how plastic the brain can be.

1. Practice and challenge are essential.

Repeatedly engaging in tasks that stretch your abilities leads to changes in both brain activity and brain structure, even in older adults.

2. Physical exercise is one of the most powerful enhancers of plasticity.

Aerobic activity increases levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which supports neuron survival and strengthens synaptic connections. Regular exercise is consistently linked to better learning, memory and overall brain health.

3. Sleep plays a critical role in consolidating brain changes.

During deep sleep, important neural connections are strengthened while less useful ones are weakened, supporting learning and emotional regulation, as shown in neuroscience research.

4. Chronic stress can seriously impair plasticity.

Long-term exposure to stress hormones is associated with reduced complexity of neural connections in memory-related brain regions and heightened sensitivity in threat-processing systems, undermining learning and flexibility.

When plasticity works against us

One of the most important and often misunderstood aspects of neuroplasticity is that it is value-neutral. The brain adapts to repeated experiences whether those experiences are helpful or harmful.

This helps explain why conditions such as chronic pain, anxiety disorders and addiction can become self-reinforcing. Through repeated patterns of thought, feeling or behaviour, the brain learns responses that are unhelpful but deeply ingrained, a process known as maladaptive plasticity.

The hopeful side of this insight is that plasticity can also be deliberately directed toward recovery. Psychological therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy are associated with measurable changes in brain activity and connectivity, particularly in networks involved in emotional regulation. Rehabilitation after stroke or brain injury relies on the same principles, using repeated, task-specific practice to compensate for damaged areas.

Clearing up common myths

Perhaps the most persistent myth is that neuroplasticity means the brain can change rapidly or without limits. In reality, meaningful neural change takes time, repetition and sustained effort, within biological constraints.

Another misconception is that plasticity disappears after childhood. While children’s brains are especially flexible, strong evidence shows that plasticity continues throughout adulthood and into older age.

Claims that brief brain-training programmes dramatically increase intelligence or prevent dementia are not supported by solid scientific evidence. The issue is that meaningful brain change happens most when learning is challenging, varied, and connected to real life.

Activities such as learning a language, exercising regularly, playing a musical instrument, or engaging in complex social interaction are far more effective at strengthening the brain than tapping through app-based puzzles.

In short, brain-training games can be fun and mildly useful, but they train you to play games well, not to think better overall.

Our understanding of neuroplasticity has come a long way since Hebb’s early ideas. What was once thought impossible is now accepted scientific fact. Embracing neuroplasticity means recognising that brains can change, while remaining realistic about how slowly and selectively that change occurs.

More than a century ago, Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal wrote that every person can become the sculptor of their own brain. Modern science shows that this sculpting never truly ends. It simply requires effort, patience and persistence.

Laura Elin Pigott, Senior Lecturer in Neurosciences and Neurorehabilitation, Course Leader in the College of Health and Life Sciences, London South Bank University and Siobhan Mclernon, Senior Nurse Lecturer, London South Bank University

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

Australia has a problem. Across the economy, business investment has been sluggish for the past decade, leaving policymakers reaching for solutions.

Weak business investment can leave the economy stuck in low gear, operating without enough equipment or technology and failing to meet its potential. It’s tempting to think that if investment could be revived, higher living standards would follow. But it is not that simple.

In a recent report on creating a more dynamic and resilient economy, Australia’s Productivity Commission proposed some big changes to the way businesses are taxed in Australia, including lowering the corporate tax rate for most businesses and introducing a unique new cash flow tax.

So, what exactly is the Productivity Commission proposing – and would it help boost business investment? And crucially, would it improve living standards for Australian people?

Lower tax rates – with a catch

Right now, there are two rates of company tax. Businesses with turnover of less than A$50 million a year are taxed at 25%. Larger businesses, with turnover of more than $50 million, face a 30% tax rate.

The proposed reform of the corporate tax system has two key elements. First, almost all businesses would be taxed at 20%. Very large corporations, with turnover above $1 billion, would face a rate of 28%.

Second, all businesses would pay a new 5% tax on their “net cash flow”. The government would collect less revenue through company tax, but it would get some of it back through the net cash flow tax. More on this later.

The profitability problem

The Productivity Commission is concerned about potentially profitable business ideas that become unprofitable when company taxes are taken into account.

For example, $1 million invested in building a restaurant might generate profits of $1.3 million over its lifetime, making it a profitable activity. But after paying 25% in corporate tax, or $325,000, the restaurant only generates $975,000 for the investor.

Knowing she will make a loss, the investor will decide not to make the investment.

Now, suppose the corporate tax rate was cut to 20%. Corporate tax paid by the restaurant would be $260,000, leaving $1.04 million for the investor. The investor sees she will make a positive return and decides to finance the restaurant. This argument is at the heart of the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to cut the rate of company tax.

In reality, the picture isn’t quite this simple. The investor must also account for the time value of money, various risks and opportunity cost, and the returns she could be making if she invested the money in other ways.

When calculating profits, the tax office includes depreciation as a cost. This deduction reduces the corporate tax bill significantly compared to our hypothetical example. Depreciation deductions are spread over many years so they are worth less than if the deduction on the whole investment was allowed up front. This is important when we talk about a cash flow tax later.

Foreign and domestic investors

Another complication is Australia’s unique dividend imputation system. If the investor lives in Australia, the tax the company has already paid on its profits is treated as if she paid it herself.

When she does her tax return, that company tax counts as a franking credit towards the income tax she owes on all her income. This means the investor is indifferent to the company tax rate because it works like an advance payment towards the personal tax she has to pay anyway.

If dividend imputation was available to everybody, the corporate tax system would be a very leaky bucket indeed – all the revenue it collected would be lost again when credited to the personal income tax paid by investors.

But a lot of the money invested in Australia comes from foreign investors. They don’t pay personal income taxes to the Australian government, so the company tax we collect from them stays in the bucket.

This is the key to making corporate income tax cuts have an impact. But it is also the reason we need to be careful about how we assess the success of the proposed policy.

With lower corporate taxes, foreign investors will likely invest more in Australia, leading to a larger economy. Our economic modelling at the Centre of Policy Studies, published in the Productivity Commission’s interim report, finds the economy (or GDP) will be larger by 0.2% in the long run. This sounds good – but there’s a catch.

When the Australian government collects less tax from foreign investors, Australia’s income falls. Our modelling finds gross national income will be smaller by 0.3% in the long run. The economy will be larger, but less of it will belong to us.

A new tax on cash flow

Alongside recommendations to cut the corporate tax rate, the Productivity Commission has proposed introducing a cash flow tax.

This is a relatively rare form of taxation used in only a few countries. Like corporate tax, a cash flow tax is levied on profits.

But the big difference is that a cash flow tax treats investment costs as an immediate tax deduction, rather than gradually depreciating the investment.

This is attractive because it does not change the incentive to invest. By treating the investment as one big tax deduction at the beginning of its life, an investment that is profitable in a tax-free world will also be profitable under a cash flow tax.

This means the government can collect tax revenue from companies without having a negative impact on investment.

Under a cash flow tax, highly profitable businesses will pay a relatively large amount of tax, while businesses that are just breaking even will pay very little. Unsurprisingly, lobbyists for big business have urged Treasurer Jim Chalmers to ignore the recommendation.

A company tax cut results in lower income for Australians, but adding a cash flow tax reverses these losses by collecting more revenue from foreign investors and multinational corporations. Our modelling finds this package would lead to gains in Australia’s gross national income of 0.4% in the long run. The Productivity Commission’s report now rests with the treasurer for consideration.

Janine Dixon, Director, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University and Jason Nassios, Deputy Director and Associate Professor, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University

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

Few people globally have influenced business, sport, the environment and philanthropy like Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard.

Chouinard’s inventive approach across these spheres makes the recent biography Dirtbag Billionaire by The New York Times journalist David Gelles an intriguing read.

Review: Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away – David Gelles (Text Publishing)

The anti-authoritarian entrepreneur started out making basic rock-climbing equipment. He then built a business reputation based on ethical commerce, and eventually gave away his company, promising all profits to fighting the climate crisis.

From an Australian perspective, there are lessons to learn given growing environmental and climate concerns, while both corporate giving and corporate distrust have surged in the past decade.

The wild early years

Chouinard prefers the “dirtbag” label to that of businessman or billionaire. It’s a reference from his 1960s lifestyle, a term for someone who sleeps rough, roams widely and disdains material possessions.

As a young climber chasing adventures with friends on rock faces, rivers and waves, Chouinard lived frugally. He ate cat food, squirrels and porcupines.

In these years, inventive Chouinard revolutionised climbing. Using a junkyard forge, he hand-crafted innovative, reusable, softer metal spikes to drive into rock faces. At first selling from his car boot, he built up a US and international customer base.

But, faithful to his environmental values, Chouinard then risked the company by ditching his original top-selling metal spike that damaged rock faces for one that did less harm to the cliff face.

Along the way he employed many fellow climbing, surfing and kayaking enthusiasts, prioritising employee wellbeing and engagement in the business. This was decades before employees were seen as a stakeholder, or internal culture was considered important in a business.

A clash of values

However, with the success of his Patagonia clothing business formed in 1973, Chouinard the conservationist had entered a highly capitalistic sector. The retail market was based on trend-driven overconsumption and exploitative labour and environmental practices.

His quest to do capitalism differently is instructive.

Despite higher costs, Chouinard moved the company into organic cotton use and encouraged regenerative topsoil practices. The principled actions built customer trust and loyalty.

His approach also inspired others who saw decisions that put environmental considerations above profit were good business all round.

As Patagonia grew into a billion-dollar company, he maintained a policy of donating 1% of sales (not just profit) to the environment, no matter how tight the times.

Chouinard co-established 1% for the Planet in 2001 as an accrediting body to encourage companies worldwide to donate 1% of their sales to environmental organisations. Since founding, over 11,000 companies in 110 countries have donated a total of US$823 million (A$1.2 billion).

Chouinard also actively called out corporate greenwashing, and Patagonia was a corporate activist on multiple issues. This included suing US President Donald Trump in 2017 to keep wilderness reserves safe from oil and gas exploration and land development.

One of the first B Corps

In another leadership move, Patagonia in 2012 became the first California company to become a certified Benefit Corporation, better known as a B Corp.

This is a legally binding, transparently measured commitment to act sustainably, live up to independent performance standards and consider worker, society and environmental interests.

Then, aged 83 in 2022, Chouinard established a pioneering succession trust structure and nonprofit collective for the business. This would see Patagonia continue as an independent, environment-led activist company rather than be floated or sold and have its values and foundations diluted.

This organisational restructure supercharged Chouinard’s philanthropy.

The family retains a voice, while giving away 100% of their estimated US$3 billion and all of Patagonia’s future profits that are not reinvested in the business. (US$100 million in 2022).

Even the legendary industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie only gave away 90% of his fortune.

Lessons for future philanthropists

My previous research records the top five motivations for Australian philanthropists as:

• making a difference
• giving back to the community
• personal satisfaction
• aligning with moral or philosophical beliefs, and
• setting an example.

Chouinard’s philanthropy touches on all of these.

US philanthropy researcher Paul Schervish uses the phrase “hyperagency” to capture the character and capacity that some individuals have to achieve the outcomes they deem important for society.

Schervish suggests such changemakers build their own world rather than staying within the constraints of traditional approaches.

Chouinard built his own version of capitalism. He continues to argue the Earth is the only resource base for business, and is therefore the prime business stakeholder. Without it, there are no customers, shareholders, employees or business.

Patagonia’s core mission became: “We’re in business to save our home planet”. The company established Earth as its major shareholder.

A message in Dirtbag Billionaire for givers small and large, individual and corporate, is that authentic giving is about values.

Such authentic giving across a lifetime using money, time, voice, networks, workplaces and ethical principles is rarely so well on display as in the life of Yvon Chouinard.

Wendy Scaife, Adjunct Associate Professor and Director, Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, Queensland University of Technology

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

As parents prepare for another school year, there’s one subject that often gets overlooked: money.

Financial literacy isn’t just about numbers. It’s about building skills that will shape your child’s future decisions, from buying their first car to planning for retirement.

The good news? You don’t need to be a finance expert to teach these lessons. Start with age-appropriate concepts and build from there. Here’s what to focus on at each stage.

Primary school (ages 6–12): Making money real

Young children understand money better when they can see it and touch it. This is the perfect time to introduce pocket money – a regular allowance that teaches them money doesn’t appear magically. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Start small. Five dollars a week gives a seven-year-old enough to make choices without overwhelming them. Should they buy that chocolate bar now, or save for three weeks to get the Lego set they really want?

This waiting game is crucial. It teaches delayed gratification, which research shows is linked to better financial outcomes later in life. When your child saves for weeks to buy something they’ve been eyeing, they’re learning that big goals require patience and planning.

Use clear jars or piggy banks so kids can literally watch their money grow. It makes saving visible and satisfying. Some families use a three-jar system: spending, saving, and sharing (for charity or gifts). This introduces the idea that money serves multiple purposes.

Let them make small mistakes too. If your eight-year-old blows their entire allowance on stickers and regrets it by Wednesday, that’s a five-dollar lesson that could save them thousands later.

Secondary school (ages 12–18): Real-world money management

Teenagers are ready for more complex financial concepts. This is when you shift from teaching about money to teaching with money.

Open a bank account together. Walk them through how banks work. Tell them that banks are not just storing money, they’re businesses that pay you interest to keep your money there and charge interest when you borrow. Explain that the interest you earn on savings is usually tiny, while the interest you pay on debts is much higher.

Introduce the concept of debit cards, but explain how they differ from credit. A debit card only spends money you already have. This is a good time to show them how to check their account balance and track spending through banking apps.

Talk about wants versus needs. Your teenager needs school shoes. They want the $200 branded pair. This isn’t about saying no. It’s about showing them trade-offs. “If you want those shoes, you’ll need to contribute $100 from your savings. Are they worth it?”

If your teenager gets a part-time job, teach them to check they’re being paid correctly. The Fair Work Ombudsman website has easy tools to calculate award rates, the minimum pay rates set for different industries and age groups. A 16-year-old working in retail should know what they’re entitled to earn.

This is also the time to introduce the concept of paying yourself first. When money comes in, savings come out first. Even putting aside 10% teaches the habit of treating savings as non-negotiable – it’s not whatever is left over.

School leavers (ages 18+): Building wealth basics

Young adults entering work face a new financial landscape. They’re earning more, but expenses grow too, such as transport, social life, and maybe rent.

Start with superannuation. This is money an employer must put aside for an employee’s retirement. It may seem irrelevant when your child is 18, but a young person who understands super early has a massive advantage.

Here’s why: compound growth. Money invested at 18 has 40+ years to grow. Even small amounts become significant. If you put an extra $20 a week into super from age 18, you could have at least an extra $300,000 by retirement, thanks to compound returns. That’s the snowball effect, when the investment gains on your contributions start earning returns as well.

Introduce investing apps, but with caution. Digital investing apps such as CommSec Pocket and Stake make investing accessible with small amounts. They let young people buy into diversified funds, which are collections of many different investments, rather than trying to pick individual shares.

Explain the fundamental trade-off: higher potential returns come with higher risk. Shares can grow more than savings accounts, but they can also fall in value quickly.

Teach them about the share market without jargon. When you buy shares, you own a tiny piece of a company. If the company does well, your share becomes more valuable. If it doesn’t, your share can lose value.

Diversification – spreading money across many companies – reduces the risk of losing everything if one company fails.

The lessons that matter most

Financial education isn’t really just about money. It’s about decision-making, delayed gratification, and understanding that every choice has trade-offs. It’s a life skill you build over time, one conversation and one decision at a time.

The most valuable lesson you can teach at any age? Money is a tool, not a goal. It gives you choices and security. Teaching your children to use that tool wisely is one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

Start these conversations early. Make them normal. And remember, you’re teaching as much by how you handle money as by what you say about it. Children notice when you compare prices, when you talk about saving for holidays, when you decide something isn’t worth the price.

Angel Zhong, Professor of Finance, RMIT University

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

If you pack school lunchboxes for your children, you’ll know it can sometimes feel like a real slog.

It needs to be easy to prepare, nutritious and something children will actually eat. On top of this, there is increasing awareness it should be friendly for the environment and not generate food and plastic waste.

As a 2021 OzHarvest report noted, Australian students throw away an estimated 5 million uneaten sandwiches, 3 million pieces of whole fruit and 3 million items of packaged foods each year.

As students return to school, here’s what schools and families can do to pack lower-waste lunches.

Our research

My colleagues and I have been researching what South Australian families put in lunchboxes and why.

In our 2025 study of 673 preschool and primary school lunchboxes, we found 53% of all packaged items in lunchboxes were single-use plastics, mostly from snacks. The most common packaged snack types were chips and muesli bars.

We found families tend to let children’s preferences drive what they pack – because if food comes home untouched, kids can go hungry or food may end up in the bin.

Parents also told us they tend to rely on packaged foods because they are busy and have little time to prepare school lunches.

It’s not that they don’t care about sustainability, but choosing familiar packaged items they know their children will definitely eat take priority.

How schools can make eating easier

Our research also found primary school eating times can be short – only around ten minutes at lunch – as children are keen to get out and play.

So schools should consider extending eating time to allow children to be more settled and eat more of what’s packed. This can mean less waste and fewer hungry moments later in the day. Other research shows longer seated time for eating means children are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables.

Schools could also consider scheduling eating times after play. While teachers and parents may worry children will get too hungry, research suggests scheduling play before lunch can help children eat more of their meal, and more nutritious items too. This is because they arrive at lunch with a healthy appetite and less urgency to rush through eating.

Schools can also incorporate food and sustainability literacy into the curriculum, to help kids embrace healthier and less-packaged foods. Schools can also encourage more “nude food” (packaging-free) days, provide families with healthy, low-waste lunchbox suggestions and have recycling and compost bins handy in the playground.

How can you pack a low-waste lunchbox?

1. Talk to your child about what they like to eat at school and how much

This allows them to tell you what works for them at school – which may be different from at home. Invite them to pack the lunchboxes with you the night before school when there is more time.

This can build independence and encourages children to take more responsibility for what they eat at school. Perhaps if they have packed it and understand the work involved, they are more likely to eat it.

2. Substitute packaged snacks for alternatives

Try packing fruits that need no preparation. Also consider vegetable sticks and boiled eggs (you can prep them in a batch and store in the fridge).

You can make a batch of savoury muffins, home-made popcorn (chuck kernels in a brown paper bag and microwave) or your own portions of low-sugar yoghurt in reusable containers.

3. Stock up on reusable containers

There are lots of options to consider, including:

• bento-style, compartmentalised lunchboxes are great for packing a variety of items and they can keep foods separate, preventing soggy snacks

• small stackable tubs can be used for yoghurt, fruit chunks, boiled eggs and veggie sticks. Look for clear containers (so kids know what’s inside) with leak-resistant lids

• reusable and washable fabric or silicone snack bags for sandwiches, crackers and other dry snacks like popcorn and mini muffins.

4. Avoid these items

Avoid cling film, plastic bags and foil. Also avoid supermarket snacks in individual plastic wrappers – such as popcorn or bars.

5. Make it manageable

We know preparing school lunchboxes can be demanding for families. So if you are going to make some changes, it’s OK to start small. You don’t need to prepare everything from scratch everyday. A starting point could be using more reusable containers and portioning bulk-bought foods.

Neha Lalchandani, Research Fellow, Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition, Deakin University, Deakin University

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

For many families, the holidays mean sleep routines go out the window. Bedtimes drift later, screens stay on into the late evening, sleep-ins become the norm.

But as term time rolls around, parents start to dread what’s coming – getting overtired, half-asleep kids up, dressed and out the door on time.

We are experts in sleep health. With a little planning and patience, you can bring sleep back into your routine without turning bedtime into a nightmare.

The science behind holiday sleep drift

During the school term, children’s sleep–wake cycles are usually regulated by fixed daily schedules and predictable bedtimes. These play an important role in stabilising circadian rhythms (the internal body clock). On school days, children are typically exposed to morning daylight and structured indoor lighting, both of which help set the body clock.

During holidays, children are more likely to have increased evening exposure to screens and artificial lighting, which can delay melatonin release – the hormone that promotes sleep.

Understandably, sleep also becomes less regular. This in turn can weaken daily signals which help regulate sleep timing, making it harder to maintain a stable sleep–wake pattern.

What are the signs my child’s sleep is ‘out of whack’?

A child’s sleep schedule may be considered “out of whack” when their sleep timing becomes inconsistent and starts to affect how they function during the day.

Common signs include frequent late bedtimes, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty waking in the morning, and feeling groggy or tired during the day.

You may also notice changes in mood and behaviour, such as irritability, emotional outbursts, reduced concentration or increased restlessness and hyperactivity.

Large day-to-day shifts in sleep and wake times (especially during school holidays) can also be a sign their body clock is out of sync and their sleep schedule needs attention.

Why is it important to have a healthy sleep routine?

If you think about how you feel after a bad or broken night’s sleep, it’s probably not hard to understand why we need a healthy sleep routine.

For children, the stakes are even higher. Sleep supports brain development, consolidates learning, processes emotions and allows the body to recover.

When sleep routines are disrupted children may struggle with concentration and memory, have mood swings and behavioural difficulties, and find it harder to regulate emotions. All these factors can affect school performance and social relationships.

Here’s how to get back into a sleep routine.

1. Have regular bed and wake times

Start by setting a regular bedtime and wake time every day, including weekends, to ensure children get the right amount of sleep for their age. For primary school children, this means around nine to eleven hours a night.

If your child has been staying up later over the holidays, gradually bring bedtime earlier by 15-30 minutes every few nights until it’s back in line with their regular schedule. Do the same for wake time if your child has been sleeping in. Earlier wakings can be encouraged with exposure to daylight in the bedroom and a healthy breakfast to help realign their bodily rhythms.

Napping during the day should be avoided, as naps can interfere with nighttime sleep.

2. Have a wind-down routine

Going to bed earlier may be challenging for some children. A calming bedtime routine of relaxing activities may help some children sleep more easily. A warm bath or shower, soft music, reading a book or cuddling with a caregiver may provide comfort.

If they find it difficult to fall asleep, suggest they come out of their bedroom for a short time (such as 15 to 20 minutes) to do a quiet activity (such as reading or drawing – no screens!). This may help them feel sleepy before returning to bed.

3. Make bedrooms quiet and dark

The sleep environment matters too. A quiet, dark, comfortable space where children feel safe helps tell the brain it’s time to sleep.

Simple reward systems, such as sticker charts, can reinforce routines for younger children. This can show kids sleep is a positive and predictable part of their day.

Do the same things yourself

And don’t forget the role of parents. Good sleep habits also need to be modelled by parents. When older children see their parents maintaining consistent bedtimes and calm wind-down routines, they’re more likely to follow suit.

It won’t be perfect overnight.

Re-establishing healthy sleep patterns may take a week or two.

So start, and stay consistent, and you’ll make back-to-school mornings calmer and easier for everyone.

Yaqoot Fatima, Professor of Sleep Health, University of the Sunshine Coast; Danielle Wilson, Research Fellow and Sleep Scientist at the Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast; Jasneek Chawla, Leader, Kids Sleep Research Group at the Child Health Research Centre, University of Queensland, Paediatric Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Specialist, and Nisreen Aouira, Research Program Manager, Let's Yarn About Sleep, Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

Fish oil, also known as omega-3, is one of the most popular dietary supplements. It’s often promoted to protect the heart, boost mood, reduce inflammation and support overall health.

But how much of this is backed by science, and when might fish oil supplements actually be worth taking?

A long history

People have been taking oils from fish for centuries.

Modern interest surged in the 1970s when scientists studying Inuit diets discovered omega-3 fatty acids and their heart-protective effects.

By the 1980s, fish oil capsules were being marketed as an easy way to get these healthy fats.

What’s in fish oil?

Fish oil comes from oily fish such as salmon, sardines, tuna, herring and mackerel. It’s rich in a special type of fat called omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), mainly EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid).

These omega-3s play an important role in how our cells function. Every cell in the body is surrounded by a thin, flexible layer called a cell membrane. This membrane works like a protective skin: it keeps the cell’s contents safe, controls what moves in and out, and helps cells communicate with one another.

Omega-3s don’t build the membrane itself, but they slot into it, becoming part of its structure. This helps the membrane stay fluid and flexible, allowing it to work more efficiently, especially in tissue that relies on fast, precise signalling, such as in the brain and eyes.

Because we can’t make enough omega-3s on our own, we need to get them from food or, sometimes, supplements.

How are fish oil supplements made?

After fish are caught, their tissues are cooked and pressed to release oil. This crude oil is purified and refined to remove impurities including heavy metals such as copper, iron and mercury.

During processing, the oil may be concentrated to boost its EPA and DHA content.

The purified oil is then encapsulated in soft gels or bottled as liquid oil.

Some supplements are further treated to reduce odour or the familiar “fishy” aftertaste.

Fish oil and heart health

Omega-3 fatty acids are best known for their role in heart health, particularly for lowering triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood that, when elevated, can increase the risk of heart disease.

A 2023 paper pooled 90 clinical trials with more than 72,000 participants and found a near linear relationship between dose and effect. That doesn’t mean “more is always better”, but higher doses tended to produce bigger improvements in heart-related risk factors.

It found you need more than 2 grams per day of EPA and DHA combined to meaningfully lower triglycerides (by 15 to 30%). This is most relevant for people with existing heart disease, high triglycerides, or obesity.

But it’s important to read the label. A “1,000 mg” fish oil capsule usually refers to the total oil weight of the oil, not the active omega-3 content. Most standard capsules contain only about 300 mg of combined EPA and DHA the rest is other fats.

At lower doses, changes in blood fats were modest. The same analysis suggested low-dose fish oil may even nudge LDL or “bad” cholesterol up slightly, while having only a small effect on triglycerides.

A 2018 trial tested a high-strength purified EPA product (4 grams per day) in people already taking statins to lower their cholesterol. Over five years, it prevented one major heart event (heart attack, stroke or urgent procedure) for every 21 people treated. However this was a prescription-only pharmaceutical-grade EPA, not a standard fish-oil capsule.

In Australia, fish oils are sold in pharmacies, health food stores and supermarkets. Some concentrated products are available as “practitioner-only” supplements via health professionals.

The same purified EPA used in the 2018 trial is now available in Australia as Vazkepa, a prescription-only medicine. It was added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) in October 2024, making it more accessible for high-risk patients.

For otherwise healthy people, the evidence that standard fish oil supplements prevent heart attacks or strokes is much less convincing.

What about arthritis and joint pain?

Fish oil has mild anti-inflammatory effects.

In people with inflammatory arthritis (such as rheumatoid arthritis), omega-3s can reduce joint tenderness and morning stiffness.

These benefits, however, require higher consistent doses, usually around 2.7g of EPA and DHA per day. This is the equivalent of around nine standard 1,000mg fish oil capsules (containing 300 mg of EPA and DHA) daily for at least eight to 12 weeks.

Can fish oil improve mood?

Some studies suggest omega-3s, particularly those higher in EPA, can modestly reduce symptoms of clinical depression when taken alongside antidepressants.

A 2019 review of 26 trials (involving more than 2,000 people) found a small overall benefit, mainly for EPA-rich formulations at doses up to about 1 gram per day. DHA-only products didn’t show clear effects.

That doesn’t mean fish oil is a mood booster for everyone. For people without diagnosed depression, omega-3 supplements haven’t been shown to reliably lift mood or prevent depression.

How much can you take?

For most people, fish oil is safe.

Common side effects include a fishy aftertaste, mild nausea and diarrhoea. Taking capsules with food or choosing odourless or “de-fishified” products can help.

Prescription strength products such as Vazkepa (high-dose EPA) are also well tolerated, but they can slightly increase the risk of irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) and bleeding.

Up to 3 grams per day of combined EPA and DHA from supplements is generally considered safe for most adults.

Higher doses for specific medical conditions should be taken under medical supervision.

So, should you take it?

The Heart Foundation recommends Australians eat two to three serves of oily fish a week. This would provide 250–500 mg of EPA and DHA per day.

If you don’t eat fish, a fish oil supplement (or algal oil if you’re vegetarian or vegan) can help you meet your omega-3 needs.

If you have heart disease (with high triglycerides) or inflammatory arthritis, fish oil may offer extra benefits. But dose and product type matter, so speak with a health professional.

For most people, though, two or three serves of oily fish each week remain the simplest, safest and most nutritious way to get omega-3s.

Mary Bushell, Clinical Associate Professor in Pharmacy, University of Canberra

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

Many of us already use generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT for health advice. They give quick, confident and personalised answers, and the experience can feel more private than speaking to a human.

Now, several AI companies have unveiled dedicated “health and wellness” tools. The most prominent is ChatGPT Health, launched by OpenAI earlier this month.

ChatGPT Health promises to generate more personalised answers, by allowing users to link medical records and wellness apps, upload diagnostic imaging and interpret test results.

But how does it really work? And is it safe?

Most of what we know about this new tool comes from the company that launched it, and questions remain about how ChatGPT Health would work in Australia. Currently, users in Australia can sign up for a waitlist to request access.

Let’s take a look.

AI health advice is booming

Data from 2024 shows 46% of Australians had recently used an AI tool.

Health queries are popular. According to OpenAI, one in four regular ChatGPT users worldwide submit a health-related prompt each week.

Our 2024 study estimated almost one in ten Australians had asked ChatGPT a health query in the previous six months.

This was more common for groups that face challenges finding accessible health information, including:

• people born in a non-English speaking country
• those who spoke another language at home
• people with limited health literacy.

Among those who hadn’t recently used ChatGPT for health, 39% were considering using it soon.

How accurate is the advice?

Independent research consistently shows generative AI tools do sometimes give unsafe health advice, even when they have access to a medical record.

There are several high-profile examples of AI tools giving unsafe health advice, including when ChatGPT allegedly encouraged suicidal thoughts.

Recently, Google removed several AI Overviews on health topics – summaries which appear at the top of search results – after a Guardian investigation found the advice about blood tests results was dangerous and misleading.

This was just one health prompt they studied. There could be much more advice the AI is getting wrong we don’t know about yet.

So, what’s new about ChatGPT Health?

The AI tool has several new features aimed to personalise its answers.

According to OpenAI, users will be able to connect their ChatGPT Health account with medical records and smartphone apps such as MyFitnessPal. This would allow the tool to use personal data about diagnoses, blood tests, and monitoring, as well as relevant context from the user’s general ChatGPT conversations.

OpenAI emphasises information doesn’t flow the other way: conversations in ChatGPT Health are kept separate from general ChatGPT, with stronger security and privacy. The company also says ChatGPT Health data won’t be used to train foundation models.

OpenAI says it has worked with more than 260 clinicians in 60 countries (including Australia), to give feedback on and improve the quality of ChatGPT Health outputs.

In theory, all of this means ChatGPT Health could give more personalised answers compared to general ChatGPT, with greater privacy.

But are there still risks?

Yes. OpenAI openly states ChatGPT Health is not designed to replace medical care and is not intended for diagnosis or treatment.

It can still make mistakes. Even if ChatGPT Health has access to your health data, there is very little information about how accurate and safe the tool is, and how well it has summarised the sources it has used.

The tool has not been independently tested. It’s also unclear whether ChatGPT Health would be considered a medical device and regulated as one in Australia.

The tool’s responses may not reflect Australian clinical guidelines, our health systems and services, and may not meet the needs of our priority populations. These include First Nations people, those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, people with disability and chronic conditions, and older adults.

We don’t know yet if ChatGPT Health will meet data privacy and security standards we typically expect for medical records in Australia.

Currently, many Australians’ medical records are incomplete due to patchy uptake of MyHealthRecord, meaning even if you upload your medical record, the AI may not have the full picture of your medical history.

For now, OpenAI says medical record and some app integrations are only available in the United States.

So, what’s the best way to use ChatGPT for health questions?

In our research, we have worked with community members to create short educational materials that help people think about the risks that come with relying on AI for health advice, and to consider other options.

Higher risk

Health questions that would usually require clinical expertise to answer carry more risk of serious consequences. This could include:

• finding out what symptoms mean
• asking for advice about treatment
• interpreting test results.

AI responses can often seem sensible – and increasingly personalised – but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are correct or safe. So, for these higher-risk questions, the best option is always to speak with a health professional.

Lower risk

Other health questions are less risky. These tend to be more general, such as:

• learning about a health condition or treatment option
• understanding medical terms
• brainstorming what questions to ask during a medical appointment.

Ideally, AI is just one of the information sources you use.

Where else can I get free advice?

In Australia we have a free 24/7 national phone service, where anyone can speak with a registered nurse about their symptoms: 1800 MEDICARE (1800 633 422).

Symptom Checker, operated by HealthDirect, is another publicly funded, evidence-based tool that will help you understand your next steps and connect you with local services.

AI tools are here to stay

For now, we need clear, reliable, independent, and publicly available information about how well the current tools work and the limits of what they can do. This information must be kept up-to-date as the tools evolve.

Purpose-built AI health tools could transform how people gain knowledge, skills and confidence to manage their health. But these need to be designed with communities and clinicians, and prioritise accuracy, equity and transparency.

It is also essential to equip our diverse communities with the knowledge and skills to navigate this new technology safely.

Julie Ayre, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Sydney Health Literacy Lab, University of Sydney; Adam Dunn, Professor of Biomedical Informatics, University of Sydney, and Kirsten McCaffery, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Sydney School of Health, University of Sydney

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

For teens, a holiday or weekend job is a good way to earn pocket money and learn a new range of skills.

But given the historical and ongoing exploitation of child labour across the globe, strict laws are set out to protect children.

Australia follows the 1973 International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention on a minimum working age. Under this convention, the standard age for employing young people is 15 years old.

But people can start work before that, subject to additional legal protections. Even if young people are volunteers and undertaking unpaid work, there are similar restrictions on their activities to the limits in paid employment.

So if you have a young person in your life who’s thinking about getting a job, it’s worth knowing what the laws and rules are.

What are the rules for kids under 15?

Every state in Australia has specific requirements for employing workers who are under 15 years old. These specifications differ from state to state, but most principles are broadly similar.

For employers, they need to hold a child employment licence to employ children under 15.

There are set limits on how many hours young people can work, depending on their age. Generally, they can do up to ten hours each week.

There are also restrictions on doing heavy work. Young workers under 15 years can only undertake light duties. In Victoria, for example, a child cannot work on a building site or on a fishing boat.

There are also rules for when children can work. Working during school hours is generally not allowed because state laws require children to attend school. Legislation about children in the workplace is built around ensuring they access education.

Some jurisdictions have special provisions around times of day children under 15 can work.

In Western Australia, young workers aged 10–12 cannot start work earlier than 6.00am or finish their work after 7.00pm. Children aged 13–14 cannot start before 6.00am but can finish work at 10.00pm.

In Tasmania, children between the ages of 11 and 14 aren’t allowed to work between 9.00pm and 5.00am of the following day, unless it’s for charity or school.

There are similar laws in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.

What sorts of jobs can kids under 15 do?

While laws are in place to protect children from exploitation, there are many opportunities for children to be part of the workforce, starting as young as ten or 11 years in the delivery services industry or as child models in the advertising industry.

Children from ages 10–12 can work in a limited capacity delivering newspapers, pamphlets or advertising material.

Children aged 13–14 can extend this work to a variety of roles in the retail and hospitality sectors, including in cafes and restaurants, the fast food industry and shops.

While they can be employed in the hospitality sector, young workers under 18 generally can’t serve alcohol or sell cigarettes.

In some sectors, there are fewer requirements for employing children of any age.

Working in a family business, for a charity or not-for-profit organisation or in the entertainment industry is not subject to many restrictions, apart from the need to attend school.

Parental supervision is needed under some circumstances. For example, photographic work with children up to three years old needs a parent involved, as does letterbox delivery, door-to-door sales and charity work by kids under 12.

In some instances the requirement to undertake work outside school hours can be waived, such as when a child is home schooled.

What if a child is 15 or older?

Children older than 15 years are still subject to different conditions than 18-year-old or adult workers. Child workers up to the age of 18 years still require their parent’s consent or hold a right to work “special circumstances certificate” to be employed.

Workers under 18 years are exempt from holding a Working with Children Check, required when working in close contact with children such as in child care centres and schools, or involved in sports coaching.

The adult hourly wage rate starts at 21 years. Younger workers are paid a percentage of the adult rate, so the wages of young people are differentiated by age.

The exceptions to the rules

The entertainment and advertising industries are high profile and highly sought after sectors employing children. But they’re not subject to many of the rules above.

Laws allow children in the entertainment industry to “take the stage” at any age, provided their schooling is not interrupted. Children can work as an actor, musician, entertainer or a model in advertising under these conditions, but all need parental consent.

The entertainment industry has requirements for employers to be licensed to employ children and adult employees may need to undergo a Working with Children Check if they are working alongside those under 18 years in a role such as a coach or an actor.

Parents of child workers have the right to be informed about all aspects of their child’s job, including extensive briefings about the things their child will see, hear and do in their role.

The child cannot be exposed to anything that is inappropriate for their age, maturity and level of development, or be put in situations to cause them distress or embarrassment.

But even when entirely lawful, things can get messy. Signing kids up to record deals or modelling contracts can be hard for parents to navigate and many may not understand the potential long-term ramifications. It may be helpful to consult a lawyer when looking at legal paperwork like this.

Overall, labour laws emphasise the importance of education, adequate rest and access to leisure time. Any job a child can get must adhere to these standards.

Kerry Brown, Professor of Employment and Industry, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

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

A week out from the resumption of parliament, the federal opposition is in a state of paralysis.

The Liberals have a full-blown leadership crisis. A majority of the party believe Sussan Ley can’t survive for long.

But leadership contenders Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie, both from the right of the party, don’t want to run against each other, dividing their factional support. They’re in a wrestle, each wanting the other to pull back.

Taylor trails his coat while keeping formally within the rules. He won’t confirm he is after Ley’s job, pleading shadow cabinet discipline when pressed. But he won’t rule anything out either.

The Hastie camp had a story in The Australian saying he had discussed with his wife the implications of becoming leader, and she was “fully supportive”. This was to clear away Hastie’s position of some time ago that he was not pitching for leadership for a while because of having a young family.

Hastie seems raring to go, Taylor is preferring to delay. Moderates argue the Nationals should not be rewarded for last week’s behaviour by the Liberals rushing into a change.

The stand-off lessens the chance of a vote next week, though the situation is febrile and so it is not impossible it comes to a head then. The Liberal Party will have its regular meeting on Tuesday morning.

Many in the Liberals and some in the Nationals think the most urgent issue is to have the split in the former Coalition repaired.

But Nationals leader David Littleproud says this won’t happen unless the three Nationals frontbenchers whom Ley forced to resign last week (after they broke shadow cabinet solidity over the government’s anti-hate legislation) are reinstated. Ley has refused to contemplate meeting that condition.

Liberals continue to lash out at Littleproud’s behaviour last week, leading to the fracture. Victorian Liberal Tim Wilson told Sky on Tuesday the Nationals leader “basically replicated the political consequences of Barnaby Joyce on a Braddon pavement [when an intoxicated Joyce was pictured lying flat out talking on the phone]. They’ve hit a flat. It hasn’t worked. What we need is leadership. We need responsible people standing up for the national interest and doing what’s right by Australia and Australians.”

Meanwhile Ley needs to reshuffle her frontbench by the time parliament resumes next week, to fill the positions vacated by the Nationals. She has stayed her hand to give some time for a possible rethink by the Nationals about re-forming the Coalition. But it would be odd to go into the sitting with multiple vacancies, and especially difficult when Senate estimates hearings loom the following week.

Littleproud has yet to nominate spokespeople for a “shadow” shadow ministry. Once he does that, it becomes harder to get the Coalition back together, even under a new Liberal leader.

On Thursday many Liberals will gather in Melbourne for a memorial service for Katie Allen, who was Liberal MP for Higgins in 2019–22. It’s a sad reality that during leadership crises, such gatherings can provide the opportunity for very political conversations. This occasion is likely to be no exception.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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