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As term three rolls around, students in Years 9, 10 and 11 are starting to plan their subject pathways for their senior years.

Some students may be considering acceleration in one or more Year 12 subjects. This means placing them into classes with older peers to allow them to study above their year level. These students are likely to be among the most capable in their year group. They also tend to learn quickly and are highly motivated to learn.

The purpose of acceleration is to match the educational needs of these students with an appropriate level and pace of learning.

So how can students ensure it’s the right decision for them?

How subject acceleration works

In Australia, the decision to allow a student to accelerate (including in Year 12 subjects) is typically left to individual schools. However, it’s still expected schools will carefully consult with the student in question, teachers and parents as well as education specialists and psychologists. Schools should also consider the student’s abilities, grades and social and emotional maturity.

The NSW Education Standards Authority actually specifies the subjects for which Stage 6 (Year 11 and 12) acceleration is permitted. Some of these include advanced maths and English, the sciences, and subjects in the social sciences. Outside NSW, the subjects students can accelerate appear to differ from school to school.

While recent public data is not readily available, on average, more than 800 students at fully selective high schools in NSW accelerated subjects each year from 2018 to 2020.

Benefits of accelerating

Students are likely well aware of the practical benefits Year 12 subject acceleration can offer.

Completing one or more Year 12 subjects in Year 11 can spread a student’s final year study load across two years. It can also give them an earlier understanding of Year 12 study demands and how assessments are run. In Victoria, accelerating an additional Year 12 subject can add an ATAR increment too.

Subject acceleration can increase student motivation and engagement as their interests and abilities are better matched. Research suggests acceleration may also lead to better career outcomes and wellbeing. For example, a 2021 longitudinal study tracked students who accelerated in the United States and found their psychological wellbeing was above average at age 50.

Outside of learning, acceleration can provide more opportunities to create friendships with students in the year level above who have similar abilities and interests. Teachers, too, may benefit from having a smaller range of abilities to accommodate in the classroom.

What to watch out for

While there are many positives to subject acceleration, not every student may be suited to it. For example, some students may face social difficulties in classes they accelerate into when developing relationships with students above their year level.

And if teachers lack familiarity with (or training on) the practice, subject acceleration may not always be successful. Also, if teachers and parents haven’t properly assessed whether students are socially and academically ready, then acceleration may not be the right choice.

Research suggests common concerns around accelerated students experiencing increased pressure, burnout or reduced confidence appear to be unfounded in both the short and long terms.

How does a student know it’s right for them?

These are some factors students and families can consider to help them make a decision. Subject acceleration is most likely to be successful if:

1. the student is strongly motivated to accelerate in the subject without any pressure from parents, peers or their school

2. the student has proved they can take on the accelerated subject based on previous assessments of ability and achievement

3. the student has the social and emotional maturity to take on the challenge of acceleration in a new learning environment

4. the school is able to provide individualised support to students such as testing for gaps in learning and then addressing these gaps with additional teacher or mentor support

If the student is still unsure, they may be able to trial a period of acceleration before making a final decision.

Jae Yup Jung, Associate Professor, School of Education, UNSW

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

I’ve been fortunate to dive in Tasmania’s giant kelp forests over the past three decades, launching into chilly waters. When diving in these forests, light filters through the golden ribbon-like fronds in beams, lighting the array of fish that sail through like birds in a rainforest. On the seabed, pearlescent abalone shells shine and sunset-orange crayfish prowl, eyes agog.

Kelp forms a foundational part of the Great Southern Reef, which extends 8,000 kilometres around southern Australia from Kalbarri in Western Australia to Coolangatta in Queensland. Here, for certain groups of organisms – seaweeds, sponges, crustaceans, chordates, bryozoans, echinoderms and molluscs – as many as 30–80% of species are found nowhere else on Earth. Think the weedy sea dragon, for instance, with its leaf-like fins.

The region is a biodiversity hotspot, lesser known than the Great Barrier Reef, but equally worthy. There are also commercially important species such as rock lobsters and abalone that rely on healthy reefs for shelter and food.

Giant kelp is found in the southeastern corner of the Great Southern Reef. It has historically been a tourism drawcard. Diving in giant kelp forests is like being transported into the Jack and the Beanstalk fable – which is not really an exaggeration, given its almost miraculous growth rate. Giant kelp can grow 50 centimetres a day in ideal conditions, reaching more than 30 metres from the seafloor.

It used to choke boat propellers, hampering anchoring around Tasmania, but in recent decades giant kelp has declined by 95% along the island’s east coast. The reason for its demise: warmer, nutrient-poor waters extending further down the Australian coastline than they once did, as well as the arrival of the invasive long-spined sea urchin, which grazes on kelp and other seaweeds, causing marine deserts called barrens.

In 2012, the giant kelp marine forests of southeast Australia became the first marine community to be listed as endangered under the federal government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

My husband, Craig Johnson, a marine biologist, was one of the first to document the decline and to think of rearing warm-tolerant giant kelp varieties and reseeding them in the wild, through his work at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Science.

Now, teams of researchers are working on just this, buoyed by the possibility of restoring Tasmania’s iconic undersea forests. Trials have shown that giant kelp forest can return in the space of a year.

So nature can heal if given a chance. The dream is that warm-tolerant strains could be successfully reared and replanted at scale, and that these forests would reseed more forests. If invasive urchins could be controlled, the barrens could again be replaced by healthy temperate reefs.

In an era of eco-grief, rewilding projects like this are having a moment, even attracting the interest of royalty. On their March 2026 visit to Tasmania, Denmark’s Queen Mary and King Frederik accompanied researchers on a field trip to a remnant stand of giant kelp south of Hobart in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. They heard from the institute’s Scott Ling about the reseeding efforts.

It begs the question: can we imagine ourselves into a brighter future? From moves to restore giant kelp forests in Tasmania to the successful reintroduction of white storks in the United Kingdom, where they are now breeding for the first time in 600 years, the answer might be yes.

Rewilding takes hold

In a growing number of places around the world, a vision to bring species back from the brink of extinction is working. Some projects, such as the kelp one, involve selecting and rearing naturally occurring resilient varieties that can thrive in our changed circumstances. Others involve simply reintroducing lost species that were once predominant, such as wolves in forests in northern Europe.

Endangered eastern quolls are being reintroduced to a highland property known as the Quoin in the Tasmanian highlands, with confirmation of the successful arrival of pouch young, a sign that the program, which introduced 24 quolls in 2025, is progressing well. This program emerges from the broader vision of Lisa Miller, a zoologist by training, through Wedgetail, a private company investing in restoring ecologically valuable areas around the globe.

I’ve seen a quoll only once, on our property south of Hobart, a sleek spotted flash through the bush, so fast I questioned whether it was real. How wonderful if they were to return in numbers, if not yet to the suburbs of Hobart, then to the Tasmanian highlands.

Storks bringing luck

A world away in Sussex, England, success at an old castle estate is capturing the world’s eye, and its heart. Thanks to the vision of property owners Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, a highly successful rewilding effort is transforming Knepp Estate. Myriad species are returning, from white storks to purple emperor butterflies.

Thanks to the work of the owners and the research and community organisations with which they have partnered, the list of species flocking to Knepp Castle Estate has a ring of the Middle Ages to it. Knepp has become a breeding hotspot for critically endangered nightingales and turtle doves. Then there are peregrine falcons, sparrowhawks and skylarks. Tree has documented the project in her book Wilding, and captured it too in a hit documentary of the same name.

I visited the property in 2023 and met Laura Vaughan-Hirsch, a biologist who manages the white stork project at Knepp.

She told me the white storks were initially introduced to Knepp from Poland’s Warsaw Zoo. She showed me a taxidermied specimen, one of that first cohort, its body the height of a human torso, its strong beak silent. During greetings, and at other times, the storks throw their heads back and clatter their beaks in a sound captured on video in the live web cameras stationed in the Knepp oaks – watched by viewers the world over.

Since the arrival of those first storks from Warsaw Zoo, the numbers have grown remarkably, with birds arriving from wild populations. Last year there were 19 nests, which produced 45 fledglings.

People in the local community have been mesmerised by the return of the birds, some of which have started nesting on rooftops in neighbouring suburbs. Also returning are red kites, which were common in the skies above England in Shakespeare’s times. The kites are now attempting to predate on the stork nests and are being driven away by storks – the skies alive with a contest that hasn’t been seen for centuries.

It was in 1822 that the phenomenon of long-distance bird migration began to be understood in the West. A white stork was found in Germany bearing an African spear. It remains on display at the University of Rostock in Germany. Prior to that, myths abounded that the birds hibernated.

With knowledge of migration comes awareness: birds moving between countries in different seasons could well be the same population. If the population disappears from one area, it disappears from all. Likewise, if a bird species returns in healthy numbers to a region, the benefits can be far-reaching.

On my visit to Knepp, I took a tour during an open day, where members of the community were invited to hear about the programs underway. The tour leader was Tony Whitbred, formerly the chief executive of the Sussex Wildlife Trust and now a volunteer with the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre. He was expecting only a handful of people to accompany him on a walk through the property for the guided lecture. He ended up with an audience of 300.

The secret at Knepp has been to restore the environment from the ground up, first introducing wild herbivores that play a role in tilling the soil. Healthy soil led to invertebrate species thriving. Knepp now boasts the largest population of purple emperor butterflies in the UK. Bird populations have followed the increase in invertebrates.

People can pay to stay overnight at Knepp in treetop tents, an opportunity to have something of a safari experience and to commune with nature on this unique property just 25km from Gatwick airport.

Rewilding has its detractors, with some concerned about the invasion of weed species or the loss of farmland. But in the case of Knepp, the property’s heavy clay soils made the property unproductive before the program began.

Wolves on the march and greener cities

In Europe, wolves too are on the march, with 21,500 estimated to be living on the continent in 2022, a 58% increase over a decade. The return of boar, deer and other prey species has seen the wolf population expand, along with an increasing number of wolf-human interactions in countries such as Denmark.

While not everyone is a fan, the return of top predators results in changes through the food web known as trophic cascades. The effect of predators propagating downward through food webs means that ecosystems function again as they once did.

Cities are being rewilded too, to a lesser degree, but where this is occurring, it is being shown to work with species such as platypus, beavers and hornbills returning to city parks around the world.

Rewilding projects aim to mitigate biodiversity loss by returning species that have been lost. Research has even shown that rewilding could help mitigate climate change, for instance, with restored wetlands acting as climate sinks.

Yet there are challenges to rewilding. In Australia, the immense problem of feral predators such as cats and foxes mean efforts that simply create “safe havens” (devoid of feral animals) for wildlife, while vital, aren’t enough. Feral populations in the wild also need to be controlled if rewilding is to succeed more broadly.

Likewise, trying to rear warm-water-tolerant corals to help the vast Great Barrier Reef, while admirable, is labour-intensive and not a perfect fix on its own given the issue of scale. Also, once water temperatures outstrip even these corals’ ability to cope with human-made climate change, other solutions will be needed to address the damage to the reef.

But by providing something of a soothing balm of hope, could rewilding (a central theme in my new novel) also encourage further pragmatic action, a green revolution that could spread around the planet? The idea does seem to be catching on, not only for the benefits to the natural world, but for the benefits to humans. For we too, of course, are part of nature. Indeed, concepts of wildness that overlook long histories of Indigenous presence have been criticised.

The healing power of nature

More and more, researchers are recognising the health benefits from what some call nature bathing. Oxford academic Kathy Willis outlines her research on this subject in her 2024 book Good Nature. Her interest began 15 years ago when she came across a study that showed hospital patients recovered from surgery three times faster if they could see trees through their hospital windows instead of seeing walls. Her research since has shown the scientific link between green spaces and better health, mood and longevity. She covers surprising facts, such as how the scent of cedar boosts cancer-fighting cells in our immune system, and how touching wood can calm us.

There is even an academic specialty known as “blue health”. Irish national surf champion and scientist Easkey Britton has documented the science behind our connection with the water and its psychological impact on us. Surfers and scuba divers know this intuitively in their bodies and minds.

I, too, have joined a cold-water swimming group in Hobart. I’ve observed that the act of plunging into the ocean and remaining for as many minutes as the sea is warm – 13°C equals 13 minutes of immersion – brings people together. Perhaps part of the feeling of wellbeing comes simply from community.

Psychological research tells us that, as individuals, a healthy dose of daydream plus pragmatic action can help us achieve the lives we want to live. There is some evidence that, collectively, imagining a better future can also help us feel closer to one another and move together in that direction.

Katherine Johnson’s novel Every Wild Soul is published by HarperCollins.

Katherine Johnson, Adjunct Researcher in Humanities, University of Tasmania

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

The play symbol is one of the world’s most recognisable icons. Across languages, writing systems, and cultures, a single right-pointing triangle is widely understood as “start”.

Yet there’s nothing about this simple geometric icon that inherently suggests the start of something. So why does it carry this meaning?

The emergence of such universal media symbols is relatively recent in design history.

An early case study

From the 1960s, consumer audio and video technologies became internationally widespread. In 1963, the Philips EL3300 was the first mass market recorder for the brand-new medium of compact cassettes.

It featured a single button that slid left, right and up to control playback. These directions were indicated by the double-arrow rewind and fast-forward symbols, and the single arrow play symbol, respectively.

However, in this early device, the play symbol points upward, to indicate the direction the button must be moved to activate the device’s play feature.

Direction of play: left to right

Rather than being the creation of a single company or designer, the play button as we know it now emerged from a range of firms producing specialist and consumer recording equipment throughout the 1960s, including Ampex, Philips, Norelco, Grundig and Sony. These early products included a range of icons and text labels for various functions.

The play icon was among the earliest to be used. The Sony TC-100 cassette recorder, released in 1968, is one of the first devices to fully eliminate textual labels in favour of the media icons we recognise today. Notably, the TC-100 includes a right-pointing triangle for “play”.

So why does this play icon point right? On early magnetic tape recorders, tape was transported between two reels. The reel on the left side of a device contained the fresh tape. Pressing the play button caused the reels to spin, which passed the tape from the left reel through the play head, before it accumulated on the right reel.

When compact cassettes were introduced, they followed this same pattern. Thus, the play button became associated with the direction the tape moved while “playing”.

By the late 1960s, cassette recorders had spread from Europe to the United States and Japan, and manufacturers faced the problem of how to design controls that were understandable across languages and alphabets.

Preferring simple and unambiguous signs, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) converged on the right-pointing triangle as the standard play symbol. While the records for who used this icon first are hazy, the Sony TC-100 is a likely candidate.

Back to the future

The rewind and fast-forward symbols standardised by the ISO and IEC build on this same basic directional cue. Where a single triangle suggests progression at normal speed, doubled triangles indicate increased urgency in the pointed direction.

These conventions were originally applied to the transport controls – the buttons affecting the direction of tape movement – in analogue audio and film systems. But as more devices emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, these symbols expanded across a wider ecosystem of boomboxes, VCRs, camcorders and digital media.

Stop, for a moment, and for good

The square shape of the stop symbol is graphically distinct from “play”. With four corners, instead of three, no direction is indicated.

In his book Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning, renowned typeface designer Adrian Frutiger notes the shape of a square is associated with stability and closure, which metaphorically aligns with the cessation of an activity.

Similarly, the pause can be thought of as a temporary halt. While the exact origins of the pause symbol are hard to pin down, the parallel bars are reminiscent of the “caesura” used in poetry and musical composition to represent a break in continuity.

At once universal and malleable

As media technologies shifted from mechanical systems to electronic and eventually digital ones, these symbols quickly took on new meanings. The play button in particular has transcended its button-pushing roots to become a metaphor for the start of anything, such as the wash cycle on your washing machine.

This symbolism has even been leveraged across brands and marketing campaigns. In New Zealand, the Hillary Commission promoted its Push Play campaign throughout the 1990s and 2000s to get young Kiwis more physically active. And in 2019, the Ireland-based Barretstown Children’s Charity launched its We Press Play on Childhood initiative to help seriously ill children participate in “normal” childhood experiences at a specialised camp.

We find similar uses with other media symbols.

In 2022, the sports drink Powerade launched its Pause Is Power campaign to challenge the win-at-all-costs mentality in sports. And last year, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority launched 25 Metro Rewind, a year-in-review campaign aimed at increasing Metro usage by encouraging riders to revisit their travel history.

From Tokyo, to Muscat, to Palmerston North, isn’t it handy that you’ll always know which button to press to clean your clothes, start your favourite song, or change the channel on TV?

Jason Kennedy, Senior Lecturer Above the Bar of Animated Performance, Auckland University of Technology

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

Before modern weapons of mass destruction, there was Greek fire (ignis graecus). This was the term medieval Crusaders applied to Byzantine (Eastern Roman) incendiary weapons famously used in naval combat in the Eastern Mediterranean from around 673 CE to at least the 1180s.

So secret was the recipe for Greek fire that it died with the Byzantine Empire, which fell to the Ottoman Empire in May 1453.

Since then, many alchemists, historians, chemists and experimental archaeologists have tried to work out the long-lost recipe of this Byzantine super-weapon.

So, what do we actually know about this secret super-weapon?

How to use a secret weapon

Greek fire was a combustible liquid, sprayed onto enemy fleets through a brass or bronze tube (siphōn) mounted on the bows of Byzantine ships.

The liquid stuck to the surface of whatever it was sprayed on, including water, and couldn’t be extinguished. This Byzantine-era napalm gave their fleets a major tactical advantage over enemy vessels.

In the 7th century, the naval prowess of the rising Arab power presented new challenges for the Byzantine Empire.

Arab seamanship and technology – including the lateen sail, a triangular sail on a long yard that allowed ships to sail closer to the wind and thus be more manoeuvrable – proved a considerable threat. It was in this context that Greek fire came to the fore.

Byzantine emperors were always keen to showcase access to divinely-inspired technologies that sustained their cultural and political dominance.

One source comes to us via Theophanes the Confessor, a monk and chronicler writing in the early ninth century. He reports that the weapon was invented by Kallinikos, a Jewish architect from Heliopolis in Syria, who had been driven from his home by Muslim forces.

The new weapon, which Theophanes calls “sea fire”, was used successfully to destroy the Arab ships blockading Constantinople, the Byzantine imperial capital, during the Battle of Cyzicus (around 673 CE).

The “sea fire” caused the Arab ships to catch fire; the entire crew of these ships perished.

However, Theophanes oddly writes that Byzantine warships equipped with a siphōn were already available in 671–672. In other words, Kallinikos may have merely improved the weapon.

Greek fire was also used against those desiring to usurp the Byzantine throne, like the rebel Thomas the Slav. An army officer of Slavic origin from the Pontus region (now in modern Turkey), Thomas’ naval forces were defeated by the Byzantine emperor Michael II in 821 CE.

In his imperial policy manual, Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who reigned from 913 to 959 CE, warns foreigners about seeking to learn the secret recipe of Greek fire. Chapter 13 of his manual says:

This too was revealed and taught by God through an angel to the great and holy Constantine, the first Christian emperor […] it should be manufactured among the Christians only and in the city ruled by them, and nowhere else at all, nor should it be sent nor taught to any other nation whatsoever.

When a military governor betrayed the secret, the emperor reported God punished the traitor

as he was about to enter the holy church of God, fire came down out of heaven and devoured and consumed him utterly.

Used against Vikings and Normans

In the 11th century, the Viking leader Ingvar the Far-Travelled encountered Byzantine ships armed with Greek fire weaponry. The Viking saga recording this encounter relates that the substance was heated over a furnace before a brass tube emitted the flames with a terrible roar.

What this description omits is that a pump would have been used to pressurise the combustible liquid. Modern historians assume a naked flame would have been placed before the siphōn, igniting the pent-up material when released by a valve.

One of the last documented naval uses of Greek fire, recorded by Byzantine princess Anna Komnene in her text Alexiad, was against a fleet of the Republic of Pisa (centred on the city of Pisa in Tuscany, Italy) in 1099 near the Greek island of Rhodes.

She writes that the siphōn of each ship had a gilded head of a wild animal, such as a lion, so the fire passed through its mouth – adding to the terror experienced by the empire’s enemies.

Anna Komnene also records the use of Greek fire against the Normans on land in 1108. The Normans, who were descended from Norse Vikings who had settled in northern France and the local Frankish population, had by that time expanded their reach into the Mediterranean world.

A lost recipe

To this day, we are unsure of the precise ingredients used to make Greek fire. A 2002 attempt to replicate it, led by Byzantine historian John Haldon, settled on the use of a special kind of crude oil only found in the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea – then part of Byzantine territory.

This oil is light and low in viscosity but readily combustible – perfect for use in a flame-throwing device.

This might have been mixed with pine resin or pine oil, which is sticky but also highly flammable.

The legacy of Greek fire

Despite its undeniable success, use of Greek fire declined over the centuries. Either the “secret” of the technology used to propel the flame was eventually lost, or the source of the crude oil passed beyond Byzantine control as the empire dwindled.

Regardless, Greek fire left a considerable cultural mark. The subject of myth and much speculation, it resurfaced as “wildfire” in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels, adapted into the show Game of Thrones. In this world, “wildfire” was also a heavily-guarded state secret and could burn on water.

Through this, the horror and almost mythical power of Greek fire was introduced to a new generation.

Michael B. Charles, Associate Professor, Management Discipline, Faculty of Business, Arts and Law, Southern Cross University and Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Macquarie University

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

In the opening scene of the 2001 blockbuster film The Mummy Returns, two women of Egypt’s royal court engage in spectacular hand-to-hand combat.

The scene is dramatic rather than historical, but it raises an interesting question: were Egyptian women really trained with weapons, similarly to Viking shieldmaidens?

A new study of royal skeletons, published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, suggests there may be an element of truth to this idea.

The sisters and daughters of pharaoh Amenemhat II, who died around 1900 BC, were buried with bows, maces and in at least one case a dagger. The new research, led by Zaineb Hashesh at Egypt’s University of Beni-Suef, suggests these weren’t just for decoration.

The women behind the treasures

Few Egyptian artefacts are as striking as the dagger buried with Princess Ita almost 4,000 years ago. Its handle, made of lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold, is a masterpiece of Middle Kingdom craftsmanship. Yet the real mystery is the princess who was buried with it.

Princess Ita was one of five royal women interred in richly furnished underground tombs at Dahshur, the royal necropolis south of modern Cairo, as part of the family group associated with Amenemhat II. The pharaoh was buried nearby in the White Pyramid complex, named for its dazzling Tura limestone casing.

These women were members of Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty, one of the most powerful periods of the Middle Kingdom.

Excavated by Jacques de Morgan in the 1890s, the matching burial chambers contained extraordinary jewellery and cosmetic objects. They also held weapons – bows, arrows, maces and Princess Ita’s exquisite dagger.

This has intrigued Egyptologists for more than a century, as weaponry has traditionally been associated with elite men rather than female burials.

Reading lives written in bones

The study of a person’s life through their skeleton is called osteobiography. The combination of burial context, artefacts, historical records and skeletal evidence means osteobiography can be a compelling way to reconstruct ancient lives.

Archaeologists often favour large studies comparing hundreds of skeletons to understand health, diet and lifestyle across a population. Yet individuals from the deep past who have an identity – a name, family relationships, a burial context – are rarer, but scientifically powerful in their own way.

One of the most famous examples is the Viking cemetery at Birka, Sweden. Here, a 10th-century grave containing weapons and a board game was long assumed to belong to a male warrior – until DNA confirmed the skeleton was that of a woman.

Were the Dahshur princesses really archers?

The Twelfth Dynasty burials reveal an equally surprising story. Despite careful mummification, most soft tissue has turned to dust over the millennia, and the skulls were lost in the early 1900s.

However, many long bones and muscle attachments survived well enough for modern osteological analysis of the princesses’ physical activity.

The six skeletal remains – King Hor and five princesses, Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret, Nubhetepti-Khered and one unnamed woman – show muscle attachment areas associated with repetitive motions of precision gripping and pulling, consistent with archery.

Bones are remodelled continually in response to biomechanical strain. The repetitive high-intensity gripping needed to stabilise and draw a bow has been shown to leave lasting marks on bone structure. These markers can’t prove a single activity, but they are good indicators of long-term movement patterns.

Princess Noub-Hotep offers the clearest example, with bowing of her second metacarpal (a hand bone) and arrows among her burial goods.

Combined with the weapons found in the tombs, the study’s authors argue these skeletal signatures point to regular, habitual use of weapons. In other words, they say, these were not merely ceremonial burial goods.

A royal life may not have been an easy one

Fracture patterns in the bones add another dimension. Princess Itaweret shows healed trauma in a rib and foot-bone consistent with a fall or a forceful blow. King Hor has a hand fracture and skull trauma, both healed. This suggests a more physically demanding life than the sedentary existence often imagined for ancient elites.

Elite status didn’t buffer them from other hardships either: the eye sockets of King Hor show potential signs of nutritional stress and infectious disease. The shinbones of Princess Nubhetepti-Khered have features often linked to repetitive activity such as food preparation – but perhaps in this instance tied to ritual or court function.

Where next for the Dahshur royals?

The princesses may have been buried decades after their father, as part of a ritual system securing the king’s eternal rebirth. This study is unlikely to be the final word on their lives.

If DNA can ever be recovered from the skeletons, it could clarify family relationships, including for the unnamed woman in her 20s.

Further microscopic analysis (histology) of the bones could reveal how activity changed over a lifetime – whether the strain of drawing a bow declined with age, particularly in the older princesses, Khenmet and Noub-Hotep.

Comparing these elite burials with working-class remains from the same period could also show whether ordinary Egyptians bore similar patterns of biomechanical stress and disease.

Together, these approaches have the potential to transform these remarkable burials from archaeological discoveries into rich, detailed biographies of the people themselves.

Royal women whose stories have often been eclipsed by the reigns of male kings can take their place as actors in Egypt’s history, rather than passive figures in the archaeological record.

Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Heritage, Adelaide University and Michael Westaway, Professor of Archaeology and Biological Anthropology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

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

Anyone old enough to remember Kevin Keegan in his heyday as a player will also have etched on the memory his 1980 television advert for the aftershave and deodorant brand Brut.

Featuring Keegan working out in the gym and bantering in the locker room alongside boxing legend Henry Cooper, it was an early example of a footballer doing what would now be called “leveraging his personal brand”.

Keegan, whose death at the age of 75 was announced on Monday, was Britain’s first footballing superstar. But he was also perhaps the first to intuitively grasp the idea that his success as a footballer could be turned into something that held a wider cultural and commercial value – and could make him a celebrity in the world beyond sport.

Today’s footballing superstars are autonomous economic and cultural forces, global celebrities far beyond their sport, and Keegan was a bridge from that old world to the new.

Beyond football

Before the Brut ad, TV-watching Britain had been introduced to Keegan in a short public information film. Sharp and stylish in a wide-lapelled jacket with a broad black and white check, black polo-neck and chain, he tells a young boy how to cross the road safely. He seems confident and poised; a natural TV performer.

The Brut ad came next, and then promotion for Lyons Maid ice lollies. In 1996, by now manager of Newcastle United, Keegan starred with the Honey Monster in a Sugar Puffs advert that showcased the self-deprecating humour that had became an integral part of his public personality.

Today, top players cultivate, trademark and market their names, personalities, goal celebrations and much else. Consider the star names who turned out for the Nike and Adidas World Cup ads, Lamine Yamal and Ronaldinho promoting McDonalds, or the ubiquity of David Beckham in half-time commercial breaks.

But in the 1970s and 1980s this was very new. There were famous footballers, of course – some, like George Best, had pop-star appeal – but football was a working-class industry and players functioned as labour in the service of their clubs.

Less than 20 years previously, footballers had gone on strike to overturn the iniquitous maximum wage, which meant that even the biggest stars could earn no more than £20 a week – £25,000 a year in today’s money. It would be another 20 years before the Bosman ruling gave players the freedom of movement that created the circumstances for today’s astronomical salaries.

Down-to-earth, sharp and articulate, Keegan was ahead of the game. In 1976, at the height of his Liverpool career, he appeared on the BBC’s Superstars, a show that attracted massive prime-time audiences by pitting athletes from different sports against each other in a decathlon-style competition.

He competed tigerishly, but fell off his bike during the cycle heat, suffering cuts and abrasions on his back and arms. Expected to pull out, he opted to continue, saying: “These people here in the stands have come here to see me make a fool of myself and they’ve got a right to it!” That moment – in today’s social-media world it would have gone viral – and his self-deprecating reaction to it, helped to establish Keegan as a personality beyond football.

Personal brand

The self-confidence and curiosity that drove Keegan to become the first Englishman to appear in the German Bundesliga, also allowed him to appear in a pioneering 1979 documentary Brian Moore meets Kevin Keegan.

We’ve grown used to behind-the-scenes, fly-on-the wall TV shows today. But back then, there was something extraordinary about hearing Keegan talk frankly about his problems. He discussed settling in Germany, the way he was ostracised by his Hamburg teammates and the anger issues that culminated in an eight-week suspension for punching an opponent.

His ability to be authentic and vulnerable were in startling contrast to the macho inarticulacy that dominated both football and wider society. Today, it is well understood that authenticity (or at least the performance of it) increases spectators’ identification with football stars. But this was uncharted territory in the 1970s.

Characteristically, Keegan overcame his rocky start in Germany and won over the Hamburg fans. They christened him “Mighty Mouse” after a then famous cartoon character. Along with “King Kev” – bestowed on him by Liverpool supporters – these were more than just nicknames, but further components in a developing personal brand that prefigured “CR7” (Cristiano Ronaldo) “O Fenômeno” (Ronaldo) and “Cold Palmer” (Cole Palmer).

Keegan’s personal style added to his fame and cultural influence. In the mid-1970s he pioneered the bubble perm – a bouncy, tightly curled hair-do. It stood out in a football world defined by rugged, utilitarian cuts like the mullet. After initial bemusement and mockery, Keegan’s style was widely copied by other players and became one of the defining male hairstyles of the era. He also developed his own clothing line, influenced by the idiosyncratic and highly stylised Avengers TV series.

Keegan was a great player who became a brand. In an era before the internet and social media, he didn’t achieve the global influence and untold wealth of Ronaldo or Beckham. But back then there was no road map to the kind of celebrity that Keegan achieved – and he paved the way for footballers who came after him.

Simon Hinde, Programme Director, Journalism and Publishing, University of the Arts London

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

Film photography is experiencing a resurrection, summoned by unlikely conjurers: Gen Z.

It wasn’t too long ago that analog photography – which uses photographic film and chemical processing – was declared all but dead, relegated to the province of niche hobbyists and professional artists.

Digital cameras had taken over nearly all areas of photographic production. Film industry titans like Polaroid and Kodak had shrunk dramatically from their heyday, becoming shells of their former selves. Darkrooms, where students learned how to manually develop and print film, shuttered at high schools and college campuses across the country, replaced by digital labs. For most people, the spirit of analog photography was mainly channeled through Instagram filters.

But within the past five years, younger people have been increasingly drawn to the old way of doing photography.

In 2025, 35% of the 42 million active film camera users worldwide were reported to be between the ages of 18 and 30. The year prior, online searches for analog photography saw a 41% rise.

Disposable camera sales have been steadily increasing since 2023. The photography journal PetaPixel went a step further and announced 2024 as “film’s best year in decades,” as major brands have introduced new cameras in response to renewed demand and revived classic models. More than 30% of respondents to a 2024 Ilford Photo survey on film photography were in the 25-34 age group.

As I’ve witnessed more and more of my undergraduate art and design students embrace analog photography, I’m not seeing this as a trend rooted in a nostalgic yearning for the past. Instead, I’m seeing it as young people rejecting algorithms, breaking free from the alienation of social media and reacting to childhoods spent on Zoom and TikTok – a deliberate move to redefine the future of art, social connection and engagement with the world.

Pining for a ‘third place’

In my work as a historian of photography and lecturer at the University of Southern California, I’ll often ask my students about how they take photos – whether they’re using digital cameras their smartphones or analog devices.

This year, for the first time, some of my students discussed images they’d printed and the physical photography albums they’d put together of their friends and family. They talked about how they’d also been sending postcards, writing letters and tacking photographs to their bedroom walls.

I couldn’t help but think about how so much of the language tied to early social media seemed to refashion physical gestures for a virtual world – “posting” on a “wall,” “poking,” “tagging” and “bookmarking,” not to mention “friending.”

This was a rhetorical move by social media companies, likely designed to help people feel as though they were in a familiar terrain of social connection. Yet the underlying business model of these platforms depended more on maximizing engagement and advertising revenue than on nurturing authentic relationships.

Everyone knows what happened next: The more connected young people became online, the more isolated and detached they started to feel. The COVID-19 lockdown pushed social life online even further, and researchers are only now starting to see how the combination of increased screen time and isolation negatively affected adolescents’ mental health. By 2023, 51% of American teenagers reported they spend at least four hours a day on social media.

I see the attraction of analog photography as a response to life lived through screens, a pathway toward community engagement and the desire for what sociologists call “a third place.”

Coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place,” third places are meant as a space separate from home and work. They offer a reprieve for the in-between, generating the conditions needed for creative cross-pollination. They might include a local cafe, a neighborhood writing group, a weekly Magic: The Gathering game or a college fraternity – any space that allows for social interaction and personal growth.

These spaces also combat loneliness. They get people out of their heads and into a community. Oldenburg also referred to them as “havens of sociability,” places or gatherings where people can arrive alone to join others, and the atmosphere is “democratic and festive.”

Analog communities IRL

In April 2026, the inaugural AnalogCon took place in Los Angeles. Organized by the Los Angeles Center of Photography, where I serve as executive director and chief curator, it was a festival for all things analog photography. It didn’t just serve as a third place for photography enthusiasts; it also showed how analog photography – as a practice, ritual and community – is flourishing.

Vendors, industry leaders, artists and teachers participated in the two-day event, which included exhibitions, panels, demonstrations and guided photography tours around Little Tokyo. The excitement and thirst for similar events was palpable.

Photography now joins a broader trend of a generational preoccupation with physical cultural objects and media. Although music streaming represents 82% of revenues generated in the music industry, vinyl records sales have been rising for over a decade, crossing the US$1 billion threshold in the U.S. in 2025.

Nearly 60% of Gen Z are now purchasing records. VHS tapes and VCR players are also making a strange comeback, with stores like Be Kind Video and Videotheque in California offering VHS, DVDs and Blu-ray rentals.

But beyond that, record stores and video rental shops have become third places in their own right. There’s a big difference between selecting a film to stream from your bed and getting out of the house, going to a store and talking about movies with a clerk and fellow film enthusiasts.

Think about the sound a tape cassette makes when you open and close it, or the vibrant graphics on the covers of DVDs or VHS tapes. Think about rewinding or making a mixtape for your recent crush. These are objects of belonging that signal specific cultural moments, rituals and aesthetics, and many young people today are starting to experience them for the first time.

Now, think about gently inserting a roll of film into a camera. Think about choosing an angle carefully when snapping a photo, because the number of frames is limited and you want to make them count. Think about the thrill of discovery when the pictures finally emerge as objects on paper.

To me, these are more than fleeting trends. They signal a push against a digital culture that is designed to cultivate envy and reward outrage, insults and humiliation.

Instead, armed with rolls of film, more and more Gen Zers appear to be opting out of their algorithmic feeds in favor of experiencing life in ways that feel more deliberate, personal and tangible.

Rotem Rozental, Lecturer in Critical Studies, Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California

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

For many centuries, the writings of Plutarch of Chaeronia (c.46-119CE) were at the heart of elite humanistic education in the West. We can see the influence of his Lives of Eminent Greeks and Romans and the philosophical essays in his work Moralia in early modern authors from Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon to William Shakespeare.

Many of Plutarch’s essays also have a practical focus that can seem very timely in our social media age. He writes about how to cool the desire to gossip and pry into other people’s lives and how not to be taken in by salacious stories.

He gives advice about how to avoid being triggered by others’ provocations and how to benefit from disagreement. He advises on how to speak about ourselves without boasting or self-advertisement, how to tell friends from conmen (or flatterers) trying to sell us something, and how to pay attention so our minds are not overloaded and scattered.

It almost seems as if Plutarch was peering into the 21st century and responding to the mental health challenges our commercialised social media is producing at scale.

The reality, as journalist Max Fisher outlines in his book The Chaos Machine, is that social media companies have identified the same psychological vulnerabilities Plutarch hoped to help readers to correct, recognising them as effective ways to “maximise user engagement”.

Change begins with seeing the problems

Plutarch belongs to the ancient Greco-Roman culture in which philosophy was not conceived solely as a theoretical pursuit, but was linked to the pursuit of happiness. In this tradition, which long predates the advent of modern psychology, philosophers could take on the role of therapists, proffering advice on life’s challenges.

Plutarch’s practical ethics in the Moralia propose two ways to help people to live happier, more serene lives.

The first is to highlight the bad consequences of cultivating bad habits as a way of invoking shame and a desire to change. People who are constantly comparing their lives with others, for instance, are likely to suffer from envy and dissatisfaction with themselves:

there are some who cannot bear to face their own lives, regarding these as a most unlovely spectacle […] but their souls, being full of all manner of vices, shuddering and frightened at what is within, leap outwards and prowl about other people’s concerns and there latch onto and fatten their own malice.

Even without algorithmic assistance, the gossip who pries into others’ supposed secrets is likely to be taken in by the most sensational, exaggerated speculations about what others are doing behind closed doors:

For as wheat shut up in a jar is found to have increased in quantity, but to have deteriorated in quality, so when a story finds its way to a gossip, it generates a large addition of falsehood and thereby destroys its credit.

The habit of dwelling on causes of resentment, as algorithmic social media can promote today, produces “an evil disposition of soul, which people call irascibility”. A daily diet of outrage make a person “become sore and vexed at trifles and querulous at everyday occurrences, like iron thin and beaten out too finely”.

Philosophy as therapy

Plutarch’s second suggestion is prescribing regimens of what we would call cognitive-behavioural exercises. These regimens start small and aim to build up new, beneficent habits in place of the old.

Busybodies who want to know about things that don’t concern them, for instance, should first practice things like not reading every piece of graffiti on public walls they pass (the Roman world had plenty of such graffiti, as our inner cities do).

It may seem that no harm will come from reading these, but it does harm you by imperceptibly instilling the practice of searching out matters which do not concern you.

Then they should practice not looking in at every door they pass on the street. They should then practice not opening every letter they receive straight away. Gradually, through such small steps, they will build a new habit, in doing so winning attention back to their own affairs.

Today, we can adapt Plutarch’s advice by turning off the alerts on our phones and computers. We can pause before we respond straight away. We can then set times to do emails or check on our apps. And we can practice reading carefully and breathing deeply before hitting “reply”, let alone “reply all”.

It won’t happen overnight. But concerted repetition can gradually allow a person to regain control over how they engage and when, with online content and “socials”, rather than the tail wagging the dog.

Unhappiness 2.0

Like the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, Plutarch argued the happiest life is one of inner serenity and cheerfulness towards others. The happy person prioritises what they really value and savours what they have, rather than being pulled in a hundred different directions and wracked by FOMO (fear of missing out).

The chief cause of unhappiness is excessive self-love. This, writes Plutarch, “makes men eager to be first and to be victorious in everything and insatiably desirous of engaging in everything”. It makes people want to be “rich, learned, strong, […] and friends of kings and magistrates of cities.”

Today, it drives people to compete to win thousands of “followers” they’ll never meet and compare themselves endlessly with others’ artfully curated online profiles.

Advertisements are dissatisfaction machines, from a Plutarchean perspective: they fill us with desires for things we do not always need and which cannot lastingly satisfy us. He observes that “we do not manage our impulses, as sailors do their sails, to correspond to our capacity; in our expectations we aim at things too great”.

Happy people focus on what they can control. They compare themselves only with people who are worse off, to remind themselves to be grateful for what they have.

Social media prompts us constantly to compare ourselves with others who present unrealistic, glamorous images of their lives. Quantified metrics of likes, shares, followers, views and citations are there to fill people with envy.

These metrics prompt users to engage more, making themselves ever more dependent on others’ approval: “despite all this, we habitually live, out of stupidity, with our attention on others rather than ourselves.”

Plutarch’s counsel for us today would not be to turn our devices off. This is not socially possible for most people, given the changed nature of work and leisure.

Yet recent legal findings in the US, as well as growing research on the effects of social media use, especially on young people, underscore that algorithm-driven social media does not promote, and can negatively effect, individual wellbeing.

It is also has a divisive effect on liberal democracies, stoking mutual suspicion and hatreds.

Plutarch’s philosophical therapies for the sources of our unease which have been stoked by our interconnected, commercialised world all turn upon knowing ourselves. Notably, they recognise the ways our natural egotism can be played to by flatterers – or, today, by algorithms that “feed” our “likes” and our outrage.

Becoming conscious of the ways platforms (algorithmic flatterers), are designed to foster social media addiction and play to our desires and fears, allows us to become more deliberate about how we use our devices and better manage the information that increasingly floods us all.

Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University

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

Bennelong in London, written by award-winning Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison, is a thoughtful and engaging work that explores history, identity, and performance through an inventive theatrical premise.

The main character, Sebastian Anderson, is played with eagerness and conviction by Biripi, Worimi, Wadi Wadi, and Walbanga actor Guy Simon.

Sebastian is rehearsing in his apartment for the role of Woollarawarre Bennelong – an Aboriginal man who was captured by Governor Arthur Phillip and taken to Europe to meet the king – when he unexpectedly summons the spirit of Bennelong himself.

This encounter establishes the play’s central design: a conversation between the past and the present that questions how history is remembered, represented, and performed.

Weaving identity, politics and memory

As Sebastian grapples with what it means to portray an Aboriginal historical figure, the play poses compelling questions about identity and authenticity.

Is technical acting ability enough, or should an Aboriginal performer also possess a deep connection to culture, language, dance and history? And how do Indigenous actors balance Western and European conservatory training with their cultural knowledge and performance practices?

Echoes of playwright Jane Harrison’s book Indig-Curious: who can play Aboriginal roles permeate the work. The play particularly examines who has the authority to tell Aboriginal stories and how those stories should be performed.

Rather than offering easy answers, the script invites audiences to reflect on these complex issues alongside its protagonist.

Sebastian’s desire to understand Bennelong forms both the emotional and intellectual heart of the play.

The spirit of Bennelong, portrayed with dignity and nuance by Gamilaraay actor Googoorewon Knox, recounts a life reconstructed largely through the journals of Governor Arthur Phillip, Lieutenant Watkin Tench and other colonial observers. The play exposes the limitations of these historical records, reminding us Bennelong’s own voice was never fully documented.

This absence becomes one of the play’s most compelling ideas. Rather than claiming to reveal the “true” Bennelong, the production asks audiences to consider how history is shaped by those who record it. It raises questions about whose lives are preserved in the historical archive, whose perspectives dominate, and whose voices have been lost altogether.

A rich script and grounding performances

The production also revisits Bennelong’s remarkable journey to England in 1792, where he lived for several years as an Aboriginal “ambassador” before returning to Country in 1795.

Rather than presenting him as either a hero or collaborator, the play embraces the ambiguity of his legacy. He is portrayed as a complex individual navigating extraordinary historical circumstances. These layers make Bennelong an endlessly fascinating figure whose story continues to resonate.

Under Ian Michael’s assured direction, the production maintains a confident pace while balancing humour with more reflective moments. Michael finds playful moments that lift the historical material beyond a simple retelling, allowing the dialogue between Sebastian and Bennelong to feel immediate, spirited and resonant.

The lively dialogue between actors Simon and Knox anchors the production, giving weight to the hypothetical while ensuring it remains engaging and accessible.

Emma White’s naturalistic set effectively draws the audience into Sebastian’s apartment, creating an intimate domestic space where the boundaries between history, memory and the present are dissolved. Woven throughout the living room is the native Lomandra grass, evoking Country within the urban setting.

In the play’s closing moments, Gymea lilies emerge quietly from the grass, transforming the space into something symbolic and potentially ceremonial. While the precise connection between Bennelong and the Gymea lily remains open, its prominence in the final image suggests themes of resilience, regeneration and the enduring presence of culture.

Bennelong in London offers a fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the life, legacy and contested history of one of Australia’s most significant historical figures.

Bennelong in London is playing at the Sydney Theatre Company until August 16.

Liza-Mare Syron, Scientia Associate Professor and Co-Associate Dean Indigenous (ADA), UNSW

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

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in recent days, you will likely have seen the viral footage of “Jimothy”: an unusually round raccoon in Seattle that hops and skips along in video filmed by local resident Kiana Hall.

This animal has a very rare congenital deformity called short spine syndrome, where the spine fails to develop properly in utero.

In fact, the condition can affect dogs, calves and other mammals – but is so vanishingly rare that in my entire career, having treated thousand and thousands of small animals, I have never seen a clinical case in real life.

What causes the condition, and can it be fixed?

Short spine syndrome is so exceedingly rare that it’s hard to say exactly why it happens.

When it is seen, it can be in wild or rescue animals – cases where the lineage is hard to map out and study.

What we can say is that the condition results in animals having normal limb length but significantly shorter spines. This gives them the appearance of having no neck and a short, round body. The normal length of spine is compressed and can they look almost spherical.

One notable example is an Instagram-famous dog named Tilly – sometimes known as “Tilly the Friendly Loaf”.

Tilly and Jimothy are clearly survivors.

It’s possible many animals that develop this condition in utero do not survive long; a lot depends on the degree of deformity and how it affects the spinal cord. Many might not live long in utero, or survive birth or the initial months of life.

It would be pretty unusual to have a puppy born with it but you never know; readers may have had dogs like this at home, but it would be just a handful of cases.

The deformity is so severe it would be extremely challenging to try and correct it surgically.

Short spine syndrome throughout history

It’s not a new condition, and has always sparked human attention. In fact, it has been documented in the past via paintings.

One 1968 paper focused on two dogs with the condition that were depicted in the 1600s by Swedish painter David Klocker Ehrenstrahl, who described the dogs as “monster of wolf and dog” and “monster of fox and dog”. One famous painting is titled “Deformed dog”:

As the author of that paper puts it, these paintings constitute “early historical evidence of the existence of this malformation”.

There is also a Japanese case report from the 1960s that describes how

The external appearance of “short-spine dogs” was characteristic and very odd.

Resilience and survival

When I saw the footage of Jimothy, it made me think of the resilience of nature. Here is an animal that has had an unlucky start but is getting on with life as best he can, with the support of his amazing mother.

Jimothy’s story is, among other things, about how animals with this condition can adapt, survive and lead a happy life. It shows the resilience of animals in nature – and that’s something we can all draw inspiration from.

Chris Tan, Associate Professor in Veterinary Surgery, University of Sydney

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

Around 76,300 Australians gained a job in June, well above market expectations, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.4%.

That’s because the participation rate – which measures the share of working-age Australians either working or looking for work – jumped to 67% in June from 66.7%. People aged 55–64 had the largest annual growth in the participation rate, up 0.8 percentage points to 70.6%.

That combination of more people in new jobs, balanced by more people also looking for work, kept the unemployment rate unchanged.

With inflation figures due out next Wednesday, today’s jobs update is one of the last major releases of economic data before the Reserve Bank of Australia’s August meeting to decide on whether to change interest rates. Together, they’ll provide important snapshots of the economy before the RBA announces its rates decision on August 11.

The strength in the labour market suggests it may prove resilient to any further interest rate rises. Following the jobs news, financial markets increased their expectations of a rate rise in August to more than one in three.

How the jobs market has changed in 2026

Unemployment has risen slightly over the past six months, up from 4.1% in December last year.

But the latest figures confirm businesses are still hiring and employment has continued to grow in Australia, albeit at a slower pace than during the post-pandemic rebound.

Employment has held up despite three rate hikes this year from the RBA, as well as subdued economic growth.

Looking back over the past six months, unemployment has remained around the mid-4% range, still lower than the average over the past century of 4.9%.

This suggests employers remain reluctant to shed staff after recent labour shortages. Strong migration has expanded both labour supply and labour demand, while participation remains close to record highs.

Taken together, the first half of 2026 points to a labour market that is gradually normalising, rather than weakening sharply.

For policymakers, this is close to the ideal outcome: labour demand is easing enough to reduce inflationary pressure, without causing a significant deterioration in employment – and hurting job seekers.

Underemployment and other signs to watch

The unemployment rate remains the headline measure, but it is unlikely to provide the earliest signal if labour market conditions soften over the coming months.

One indicator to watch is underemployment, which measures people who want to work more hours. The underemployment rate rose to 6.5% in June, up from 6.3% in May.

Because employers often reduce hours before reducing headcount, underemployment and hours worked can provide earlier signals of weakening labour demand than the unemployment rate.

Youth employment – typically referring to Australians aged 15–24 – is another useful indicator.

Younger workers are more likely to be in casual or temporary jobs, or entering the workforce for the first time. Employers often reduce hiring before cutting jobs, so young people are usually among the first to feel the effects of a slowing labour market.

A sustained rise in youth unemployment could therefore provide an early warning sign for others.

Women’s labour force participation also deserves attention. Strong participation among women – at 63.3% in June, up from 62.9% – has been supported by childcare reforms, strong labour demand and greater workplace flexibility.

Whether it remains elevated will provide another gauge of the labour market’s underlying strength.

What it means for interest rates

While the market is widely tipping at least one rate rise before the end of this year, I’m not yet convinced the RBA will lift rates again.

But today’s monthly labour force report will be carefully considered by the RBA board when it makes its interest rate decision in August.

The RBA’s objective is to return inflation sustainably back to its 2–3% target range, while preserving as much of the strength in the labour market as possible. Labour market data matters, because it provides information about spare capacity, wage pressures and underlying inflation.

Getting back to the RBA’s inflation target won’t be easy, given Australia is still well above that range now. Underlying inflation rose to 3.6% in May.

And there’s little sign that those cost-of-living pressures will ease soon, especially with the Middle East war once again pushing oil prices higher.

The June quarter inflation figures – which the RBA board will be anticipating more than this unemployment update – are due out next week. It would be surprising if there’s much good news on that front.

In its most recent May outlook, the RBA said it expected underlying inflation “to remain above 3% until mid-2027, as fuel-related cost increases are passed through to consumer prices”.

On its own, these new employment figures are unlikely to materially alter what the RBA decides on interest rates. But they do reinforce the view that Australia remains on course for the “soft landing” policymakers have been seeking: a gradual easing in inflation, while preserving a relatively resilient jobs market.

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.

Next Monday, millions of people in Australia will feel their phones buzz with a message and hear a loud, siren-like warning.

It’s a preview of how the country plans to warn its population when the next bushfire, flood or cyclone comes down. The system is AusAlert, Australia’s most significant overhaul of disaster warning infrastructure in a generation.

AusAlert uses “cell broadcast” technology, sending a signal from the phone tower itself to every compatible device nearby, without needing a phone number or app. This approach is already in place in New Zealand, the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and more than 30 other countries.

AusAlert does need mobile reception, but it doesn’t get clogged by network congestion like text messages (SMS), and can reach anyone passing through a danger zone. Community testing wrapped up in June 2026, with a national test on July 27 around 2pm AEST. The system will be fully operational from October.

It’s a significant improvement to how Australia sends emergency warnings, but the question isn’t just “does it work?”. It’s also “what do I do next?” and “who does it work for, and who does it leave behind?”

Not a ‘one size fits all’

More than one in five Australians speak a language other than English at home. People with disability are up to four times more likely to die in a disaster than those without, and this is exactly where most warning systems start to fail.

Warning systems are usually built on a one-size-fits-all assumption – this is what we learned after reviewing 70 disaster apps, 48,000 user reviews, and discussions with disabled communities and emergency agencies.

Most warning systems are built in the majority language (such as English for Australia), leaving culturally and linguistically diverse communities at a loss.

Age is another barrier. In one of our recent studies, older participants struggled to navigate back to the home page after following an external link.

Vision issues add another layer: small text, colour-coded warnings and live maps can all be inaccessible depending on someone’s visual impairment.

Australia adds a structural issue on top of these: there’s no single national digital platform (website or app), with each of the eight states and territories running its own warning system with their own digital platforms.

AusAlert, but make it adaptable

Our research points to one answer: a single national platform that adapts to each person’s combination of needs – language, literacy, vision.

A broadcast alert such as AusAlert is a great place to start. However, instead of being a generic message for everyone, such an alert should guide people to a single platform where they can set preferences in a few clicks, and receive warnings and next-step advice tailored to those preferences and needs.

This isn’t just our view. The global Early Warnings for All initiative, spearheaded by the World Meteorological Organisation and UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, emphasises that inclusive warning systems are every country’s responsibility by 2027.

Does AusAlert measure up to this? On delivery, yes. The cell broadcast fixes network congestion that historically affected SMS alerts.

The government has also produced tailored awareness materials for eight different groups, including non-English speakers, explaining what AusAlert is and how it’s expected to behave. But this is only awareness material. It doesn’t say what to do when disaster strikes.

Where to next?

A sample AusAlert reads:

An Emergency Warning message has been issued for [area/disaster]. Leave now if you receive this message. Visit nema.gov.au for more information.

But the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) website functions more like a directory; its state pages redirect to state and territory emergency websites.

That’s at least three jumps between the alert landing on your phone and finding out what to do next: first the alert, then to NEMA, and then to a local state website, depending on where you happen to be located.

If a real disaster is underway, that’s a lot of steps – especially if you have access difficulties to begin with. And state-based websites are not yet up to scratch, as we know from our research group’s work on the inclusivity of Australian warning systems.

For now, the best thing you can do is check your state or territory emergency preparedness website before you need it, and build an emergency plan tailored to your needs. And the July 27 national test is a real opportunity for the public to give feedback while the system is still adjustable.

Being warned and being ready to act are different things. Australia has built an excellent version of the first: AusAlert can wake up every phone in the country almost instantly.

But it can’t yet tell every person – inclusive of their access needs – what to do once they’re awake. That’s the gap that matters now. A warning system that ends at “leave now” is only the beginning.

Anuradha Madugalla, Lecturer, Software Engineering, Deakin University

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

Partners do not simply grow old together, they often grow more alike.

Decades of shared routines, environments and experiences leave couples with increasingly similar health profiles, a pattern long recognised for obesity, diabetes and heart disease and stroke.

Could dementia now belong on that list?

A new nationwide study from Taiwan suggests the answer is yes – but not for the reason many headlines might imply.

The shadow of shared lives

In this study involving almost one million married adults, researchers found that when one spouse developed dementia, the other was significantly more likely to receive the same diagnosis.

This observation itself is not entirely new.

Smaller studies have reported similar findings over the past decade. What distinguishes this study is its scale and ability to explore how age, income and family circumstances shape that risk.

Researchers analysed health-care records enrolled in Taiwan’s national health insurance program between 1998 and 2022.

The study included more than 190,000 people whose spouse had a new diagnosis of dementia and compared them to more than 760,000 people who did not have dementia or a spouse with dementia. Participants were matched according to age, sex, income and residential location before being followed over time to determine whether they subsequently developed dementia themselves.

The analyses also accounted for participants’ medical conditions, health-care use and family size. This meant the researchers could ask a more sophisticated question: will someone whose partner has dementia still be more likely to get a diagnosis themselves, even after accounting for the factors couples already share?

The answer was yes.

Women whose partners developed dementia had a 74% higher relative risk of developing dementia. For men, the increase was 69%.

These figures only tell part of the story though. Relative risk describes how much more likely one group is to develop one condition compared to another condition. It says little about the actual probability of developing that condition.

This is where absolute risk becomes important.

Over five years, around 6.5% of women whose spouse developed dementia were diagnosed themselves, compared with 3.7% of women whose spouse did not. Among men, the corresponding figures were 9.2% and 5.8%.

Viewed another way, a spouse’s diagnosis was associated with roughly three additional dementia cases per 100 women, and just over three cases per 100 men, over five years.

More than shared habits

These findings should not be interpreted as evidence that dementia somehow passes between partners. They point towards something more subtle.

People tend to choose partners who are like them. Education, income, health behaviours and even cognitive reserve often align long before dementia enters the picture. Researchers describe this as assortative mating.

Over subsequent decades, couples accumulate shared experiences. They live in the same neighbourhoods, breathe the same air, eat similar diets, remain similarly active and encounter many of the same opportunities and constraints that shape brain health across the life course.

This study, however, was not designed to determine why spouses share an elevated dementia risk. It did show that the association persisted after accounting for many established cardiometabolic risk factors (high blood pressure, insulin resistance) and psychiatric risk factors (such as depression and anxiety) in both partners.

This suggests that shared health profiles alone may not fully explain the findings, but the study cannot identify the mechanisms responsible.

The broader evidence offers several plausible explanations. Caring for a partner with dementia is associated with chronic stress, disrupted sleep, social isolation and changes in health behaviours – for example, reduced physical activity and poorer diet. Each of these has been linked to poorer cognitive outcomes.

Emerging evidence also suggests that poor oral health and the gut microbiome may contribute to cognitive ageing, although these require further investigation.

For now, these mechanisms remain hypotheses rather than conclusions from the Taiwanese study itself. Its contribution lies elsewhere: demonstrating, at an unprecedented scale, that dementia risk clusters within couples and prompting new questions about how shared lives influence brain health.

Beyond personal choice

Over the past decade, dementia risk reduction has increasingly focused on individual action.

The recently updated World Health Organization Guidelines for Risk Reduction of Cognitive Decline and Dementia continue to emphasise, as key strategies for reducing dementia risk:

• physical activity
• a healthy diet
• keeping your blood pressure in check, through diet, exercise and, if needed, medication
• quitting smoking
• getting a hearing aid if you need one
• lifelong learning.

The evidence supporting these recommendations remains compelling.

Encouraging healthier lifestyles is therefore both sensible and necessary.

Equally important is avoiding prevention messages that imply dementia is simply the consequence of personal choices. As I have recently argued with colleagues, prevention should empower people while recognising responsibility for brain health is shared across individuals, communities and governments.

Risk itself is also socially and culturally mediated. People’s opportunities to adopt healthy behaviours are shaped by education, income, housing, neighbourhood, cultural expectations and broader social policies.

Dementia risk reduction therefore depends not only on what people choose, but also on the circumstances in which those choices could be made.

The broader lesson

Perhaps the most important message from this study has little to do with spouses at all.

Dementia does not emerge from a single decision or a single risk factor. It emerges from lives lived over decades. Prevention should be built with the same long view.

Joyce Siette, Associate Professor | Deputy Director, The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University

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

An autonomous agent powered by OpenAI’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models went rogue during a security test and hacked multi-billion dollar tech startup, Hugging Face, last week.

The agent didn’t just exploit vulnerabilities in Hugging Face’s systems to achieve what it perceived as a strategic gain. It also exploited vulnerabilities within OpenAI’s infrastructure.

Of course, hacks are very common cyber threats that organisations face frequently. But this incident is different, because the AI agent acted without any human input. It signals a seismic shift in cybersecurity, and shows that governments and tech companies need to take urgent action to prevent this risk escalating.

Even OpenAI described the attack as “unprecedented” and acknowledged it expects similar ones “to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models”.

A company under attack

Hugging Face is famous in the AI space. Its mission is to “democratise good machine learning” by providing benchmark datasets, community collaboration tools, and robotic platforms. The company is valued at US$4.5 billion.

On July 16, the company announced it had been attacked, with a hacker obtaining unauthorised access to some internal datasets and credentials. It said the hacker was likely “an autonomous AI agent system” due to the sophistication of the attack.

Five days later, Open AI announced the attack had been driven by some of its models: GPT-5.6 Sol and a yet-to-be released model.

The tech giant was conducting what are known as “red teaming” exercises. These are essentially simulated cyber attacks that help identify the capabilities, risks and vulnerabilities of AI systems before they are publicly released. They are typically conducted within an isolated environment to ensure potentially dangerous systems do not escape and cause harm to real systems.

But in this case, the AI agent did escape – even though OpenAI had some guardrails in place to prevent this.

Hugging Face became a lucrative opportunity for the AI agent. It hosts ExploitGym, a benchmark that tests an AI agent’s ability to exploit real-world systems. The AI decided to turn every stone upside down to obtain access. With persistence, it succeeded.

Hugging Face was confronted with a challenge when attempting to use external AI services to diagnose the problem. The guardrails around more advanced models such as GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 are intended to stop them being used for cyber attacks – but they can also stop the models being used for sophisticated cyber defence.

So Hugging Face resorted to using an open-source model, GLM5.2, developed by the Chinese company Z.AI, to counter the cyber attack.

Hugging Face said GLM5.2 was an advantage because it was not exposed to the attack data. Both Hugging Face and Open AI are collaborating on forensic analysis, post-incident recovery and risk mitigation strategies.

More sophisticated threats are coming

A March 2025 study by the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute showed the best AI could complete 80% of the steps needed to gain full control of a portion of an external system. Within four months, it reached 100%.

Z.AI’s GLM5.2 was only released in June, with 744 billion internal variables, known in the world of AI as “parameters”. The fact that Hugging Face assessed, vetted and deployed it within four weeks should be an eye-opener for organisations with long acquisition cycles.

The connectivity we all enjoy today can equally be our greatest threat. Cyber threats spread faster than human viruses and can create economic damage similar in magnitude to a country’s GDP.

More sophisticated cyber threats – the kind exemplified by the Hugging Face hack – will exploit the security layers that humans designed for human attackers, regardless of how sophisticated our designs are.

Indeed, in this particular case, even OpenAI’s own understanding of its models couldn’t predict or contain the rogue AI agent. This shows the need for all AI companies to urgently update and strengthen their guardrails, in order to help prevent a similar attack occurring with far more devastating consequences.

It is good to see Hugging Face and OpenAI collaborating on the investigation into the attack. This showcases the importance of putting aside market competition and blame when the situation demands.

An early warning

The fact that Hugging Face used Z.AI’s open-source model to diagnose and counter the attack also shows the advantages of not relying on just a few pieces of tech.

States that are not in the game of developing their own AI models need to learn from this incident the value of being different. It is not too late to design new models that could save us in situations when the most advanced models fail – or, even worse, attack us.

Indeed, last week, another Chinese company, Moonshot AI, released Kimi K3. This model has 2.8 trillion parameters, its advanced performance stunning the tech world.

It is no longer a question of “if” AI agents go rogue and attack us by themselves. The Hugging Face incident is an early warning that we must accelerate our preparedness. The threat is real and here.

Hussein Abbass, Professor, School of Systems and Computing, UNSW

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

The Victorian government has announced it will introduce “nation-leading” laws to make technology companies accountable for preventing hate and keeping children safe.

The announcement comes as governments around the world grapple with how best to mitigate online harms, including emerging ones associated with artificial intelligence (AI).

So what are the new laws? And how will they work in practice?

Unmasking trolls

The state will introduce a new “unmasking” law. This will enable Victorians who are being vilified online to find out who is targeting them via anonymous accounts.

The law will give the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) the ability to issue a “demasking order” to force social media platforms to identify anonymous users.

“Hiding behind an anonymous account online should never mean you can vilify someone and get away with it,” Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen said in announcing the new law.

This new law follows the April 2026 introduction of stronger civil protections for people targeted with vilification because of a protected attribute, such as their race, religion, disability, gender identity, sex, sex characteristics or sexual orientation.

It also comes amid growing debate about when someone should be afforded anonymity offline.

As antisemitism adviser and former chief scientist Alan Finkel told the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion last week:

I do feel that the cloak of secrecy across our community, not just in universities, is possibly overused, especially if somebody has been found to have breached a code.

Making it easier to sue

Victoria will also introduce a new law to make it easier for families to sue social media platforms and AI providers for negligence causing psychiatric harm to a child.

Currently, there is a legal threshold requiring “proof of a permanent impairment of 10% or more” before a family can bring an action before the courts. The new law will remove that threshhold in cases brought on behalf of children.

In making this announcement, the government pointed to overseas courts that have already found platforms liable for designing addictive features aimed at children.

For example, in March 2026, a court in the United States found Meta and Google were negligent in the design of their platforms, Instagram and YouTube. The companies were ordered to pay millions to a young woman who argued the social media platforms exacerbated her mental health conditions.

The government said it will consider whether to extend similar protections to adults.

Several points of concern

These laws are not yet drafted, let alone implemented. So how they will work is not yet clear. The government’s announcement explains these laws “will be developed following targeted consultation with VCAT, the courts and other stakeholders”.

The time needed for consultation and to draft the laws may also prove challenging, with a state election set to be held in November. That leaves only a few weeks of sitting time for the government to pass these reforms ahead of the election.

The consultation period is also likely to raise several points of concern.

Some cyber security experts have criticised the proposal. For example, Susan McLean, a former Victorian police officer who now specialises in cyber safety, said it “highlights the Victorian government’s lack of understanding of the digital world”.

One key criticism is that the courts can already compel technology companies to identify anonymous users, with police able to access this information through social media platforms’ law enforcement portals.

But as Susan McLean acknowledged, many cases “go unreported [as] people don’t make a police report in the first place”.

While extending VCAT’s powers may facilitate the process for identifying anonymous users in civil cases, this still places the burden on consumers to sue technology companies.

This means the benefits of this new law may be beyond the reach of those who cannot afford to pursue litigation.

Another concern is how the law would be applied to users in other countries, or those who pretend to be outside of Victoria by using VPNs. It is also unclear whether technology companies would comply with the laws and what the consequences would be for non-compliance.

Is there a better alternative?

Even if these new laws are passed, consumers living in other states would not benefit from these reforms. Other states would need to introduce similar laws, or the federal government would need to pursue legislation at a federal level.

Victoria’s consultation process may open such discussions, as happened with Australia’s social media ban. That legislation was first put forward by South Australia. It later became national law when it was taken up at a federal level. The same could happen here.

Or it may be that Victoria’s proposed laws become unnecessary as the federal government has committed to introducing digital duty of care legislation.

This law would go further than current social media restrictions to hold technology companies to account for harmful content and design features. That could address both vilification and mental health concerns.

Digital duty of care legislation could protect Australians in every state, without the need for individuals and families to pursue costly and time-consuming litigation.

Whether or not Victoria’s laws are passed, they point to the need for additional regulations to make social media, AI, and other online spaces as safe as they can be for all Australians.

Lisa M. Given, Professor of Information Sciences & Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University

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

Seeing a psychiatrist via telehealth became easier from January 2022. That’s when Medicare-reimbursed telepsychiatry arrangements became permanent.

The idea was for these video and phone consultations to provide more flexible and sooner appointment times, without needing to travel.

But our new analysis shows what happened next.

We show how telepsychiatry became dominated by consultations for stimulant prescriptions since 2022. These were mostly for people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.

Telepsychiatry for ADHD specifically did increase access for people living in rural and remote areas. But it was more likely to be provided by psychiatrists living in more affluent major towns and cities.

These types of ADHD telepsychiatry appointments are also associated with greater out-of-pocket costs than the equivalent face-to-face appointments.

A three-fold jump in ADHD scripts

We examined nearly 4 million Medicare Benefits Schedule records of psychiatric consultations between 2017 and 2023. We also looked at the relevant Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule prescription records arising from these consults.

Before COVID, our study showed less than one in 20 psychiatry consultations were linked to an ADHD prescription, and less than one in 50 were conducted by video.

By 2022, the number of ADHD-associated prescriptions increased almost three-fold from 4.3% to 11.8%. About one in four video psychiatry consults were linked to stimulant prescriptions.

Prescriptions for other psychiatric conditions linked to video consultations barely shifted over the same period, and in some cases fell.

This spike in ADHD scripts via telehealth isn’t simply because more people are being diagnosed with ADHD overall, although that’s also true. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures show ADHD medication dispensing rose roughly eleven-fold between 2004–05 and 2023–24.

We found the growth in psychiatric appointments created by telehealth was largely taken up with ADHD assessments. In particular, these are the kind of appointments that end with a new prescription rather than ongoing follow-up care.

Who is prescribing and where?

One of our earlier papers shows how telepsychiatry helps alleviate psychiatrist shortages in rural areas.

So we initially expected ADHD prescribing via telepsychiatry to be concentrated among psychiatrists working in under-served, regional and remote areas – the patients telehealth was explicitly designed to reach.

However, the steepest rise in ADHD prescribing was provided by psychiatrists practising in Australia’s most socioeconomically advantaged postcodes. Almost half of all psychiatrists in our dataset were based in the wealthiest areas. This group accounted for the bulk of the increase in video ADHD prescriptions.

That matters because video ADHD consultations, on average, cost patients more out-of-pocket than an equivalent face-to-face appointment.

So the picture is less about telepsychiatry improving access and removing the cost barrier to care. It’s more about creating well-paid specialist services for people who can already afford it.

Why ADHD, specifically?

Interest in ADHD, and its diagnosis, has exploded for a number of reasons.

Social media has allowed more people to recognise their ADHD-like symptoms, particularly adults who were never assessed as children.

Search terms such as “ADHD treatment” and “ADHD medication” climbed steadily across the study period. We found this online interest tracked closely with the rise in video prescribing of stimulants.

Others point to social media platforms, digital notifications, emails and algorithmic content taxing the brain, making it harder to focus for long periods. This “attention economy”, they argue, may also contribute to people thinking they have ADHD and seeking a diagnosis.

When services for ADHD dominate, others will miss out

None of this means the demand isn’t real, or the diagnoses are wrong. Drug treatment for ADHD has a strong evidence base and can be life-changing.

This shift was strongly associated with a higher proportion of female patients, whose ADHD has been historically under-recognised.

But these video ADHD consultations can be lucrative. They offer a way for psychiatrists to see more patients, faster. So a single “one-off” assessment of 30 minutes or longer that results in a script – the type we identified – is an attractive business model.

When ADHD comes to dominate Medicare funding for telehealth originally designed to broaden access to all psychiatric care, market access for people with other mental illnesses may be crowded out.

So yes, telepsychiatry is expanding access. But our study shows its model is focused on a single, lucrative, fast-growing diagnosis and prescription business.

What does this mean as GPs prepare to step in?

Until recently, only psychiatrists could diagnose and start ADHD medication for adults in most of Australia.

But in response to the difficulty accessing psychiatric consultations, state governments are moving to let GPs diagnose and prescribe for ADHD.

While this sounds sensible, we’d be concerned if similar issues we’ve flagged in telepsychiatry were seen in general practice. That is, an increase in commoditisation of ADHD care.

Luke Sy-Cherng Woon, Visiting Fellow, National Centre for Health Workforce Studies, Australian National University; Jeffrey C.L. Looi, Associate Professor, Social Psychiatry and Epidemiology Research Unit, School of Medicine and Psychology, Australian National University; Tarun Bastiampillai, Professor of Psychiatry, Flinders University, and Wai-Man Liu, Associate Professor, Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Statistics, Australian National University

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

Earth’s orbit is getting crowded.

About 16,000 satellites currently circle our planet, supporting everything from GPS navigation and weather forecasting to banking, emergency services and internet communications.

Dozens more are launched every few weeks. Some estimates suggest the total number of satellites could exceed 100,000 within this decade, with more conservative estimates landing on up to 60,000 satellites by 2030 – still a staggering amount.

This rapid growth is creating an important challenge. How do we safely manage an increasingly crowded orbital environment while ensuring the satellites we depend on continue to work reliably?

The risks are not difficult to imagine. Large satellite constellations increase light pollution and other disruptions to astronomy and the night sky. More satellites mean more traffic, a greater chance of collisions and an increasing amount of space debris.

In a worst-case scenario, space debris can cause a runaway chain reaction known as Kessler syndrome, which would ensconce Earth in a cloud of debris and render its orbit unusable, without the ability to launch satellites or any other space missions.

Even short of this, ageing or damaged satellites can become hazards if they stop working, collide with other objects, or eventually make uncontrolled re-entries through the atmosphere.

This raises a practical question – satellites can’t simply be brought home for repairs. So how do we maintain tens of thousands of machines that are hundreds of kilometres above Earth?

Satellites don’t last forever

The challenge of satellite maintenance became more visible in March this year when a large NASA satellite made an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

The US Space Force confirmed the spacecraft re-entered over the eastern Pacific Ocean, and NASA expected most of it to burn up, though some components may have survived. The event attracted worldwide attention as experts tracked its descent and estimated where debris might land, including the possibility that large debris could one day cause damage in populated areas.

The incident was a reminder that satellites don’t last forever. Like any machine, they age. Batteries degrade, electronic components wear out and harsh space conditions gradually take their toll.

Unlike aircraft or cars, however, we can’t easily take satellites to a repair workshop.

Once launched, they must continue operating in an environment of intense radiation, extreme temperature changes and constant mechanical stress. Servicing missions are technically possible, but remain expensive and relatively uncommon.

How do we keep satellites ‘healthy’?

Today, satellite health is monitored largely from the ground.

Engineers receive streams of telemetry data showing battery performance, temperatures, power consumption and the status of onboard systems. They analyse this information and look for warning signs that something may be going wrong.

This approach has worked well for decades. But it may become increasingly difficult as satellite constellations grow from dozens of spacecraft to hundreds or even thousands. Human operators can only monitor so much information at once.

This is where recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may help. Researchers have been investigating how AI can identify early signs of satellite degradation before they become mission-threatening failures.

One important example involves batteries. Satellite batteries gradually lose performance over time, much like the battery in a smartphone or electric vehicle.

If this degradation can be detected early, operators may be able to adjust how a satellite is used, extend its operational life or avoid unexpected failures. They could do this by sending new instructions to the satellite, such as reducing power-hungry activities, changing when data are processed or transmitted, or placing non-essential systems into standby.

Our recent research used publicly available NASA satellite battery data to explore how machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) can recognise patterns associated with battery ageing and predict future performance.

The goal is similar to predictive maintenance systems already used in modern aircraft, wind farms and manufacturing plants. Rather than waiting for equipment to fail, AI looks for subtle changes that suggest problems may be developing.

Satellites can learn from each other

In our approach, we also considered federated learning.

Normally, enormous amounts of satellite data would need to be transmitted back to Earth for analysis. This requires time, bandwidth and energy. Federated learning offers a different approach. Individual satellites can “learn” from their own experience and share useful insights with other satellites or ground systems without constantly sending every piece of raw data.

In simple terms, satellites could help each other become better at recognising potential faults. Over time, this could support continuous self-monitoring across large satellite networks.

There are, however, important limitations.

AI can’t prevent every satellite failure. It can’t eliminate space debris or solve orbital congestion on its own. Predictive models require extensive testing, such as checking them against historical satellite data, simulated faults and laboratory battery experiments before they are trusted in orbit. And any autonomous decision-making systems must be reliable enough for safety-critical applications while remaining under human oversight.

The next great challenge of the new space age may not simply be launching another 100,000 satellites. It may be ensuring those satellites are intelligent enough to monitor their own condition, detect problems early and help keep the space services we rely on running safely and reliably.

Tony Jan, Professor of Information Technology and Director of Artificial Intelligence Research and Optimization (AIRO) Centre, Torrens University Australia

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

It happens just when you need to leave. Bags are packed. Shoes are on. Then your child decides a jumper is impossible.

You say, “put your jumper on”.

They say, “I’m not cold”.

Do kids really not feel the cold like adults do? Or are they just expressing their independence? And when should you insist?

A clue from pain research

I study how children experience pain, and pain research offers one clue about this jumper battle.

A child may scrape their knee during a game and barely notice until the game stops. The scrape was there throughout, but chasing a friend or reaching the next base kept winning their attention.

Cold can slip into the background in a similar way. A child’s fingers may be cooling while the playground remains far more compelling. Then the game ends.

Their attention returns to their hands at around the same time their moving muscles stop producing so much heat. Suddenly, the jumper may seem like a better idea.

So “I’m not cold” can mean, “I can feel it and I’m comfortable”.

It can also mean, “the jumper feels worse” or “I want to keep playing”. Sometimes it means, “I am four years old and this has become a matter of principle”.

Similarly, when parents ask, “but aren’t you cold?” we’re often asking several questions at once.

Will you still be warm when you stop running? What if the wind picks up? How about later, when we’re standing still on the sideline at the soccer field?

Children report the present moment, and parents factor in the forecast.

What cold actually feels like

Your skin contains sensory nerve endings that respond as its temperature changes.

One cool-sensitive channel, called TRPM8, helps convert cooling at the skin into electrical activity in sensory nerves.

This is the same channel that menthol activates, which is why mint can make your mouth feel cool even when there’s no real temperature change.

And as you know with mint, a strong cooling sensation can sometimes become uncomfortable or even painful. Other factors such as wind, wetness, contact with cold surfaces, movement, and how much time we’re outside can all influence how we experience temperature.

For example, a parent who is standing still in a playground, clutching a coffee, may be acutely aware of the gap in their coat where the icy wind is sneaking in.

But children tend to run, climb and jump in bursts – and moving muscles produce heat.

Children also differ from adults in body size, body composition, metabolism and how their circulation responds to cold.

One 2024 laboratory study, done indoors, looked at children aged six to nine. It found their sedentary metabolic rates (how much energy you’re burning when you’re resting) were around 39% higher compared to adults in the study.

Their skin was also warmer over parts of their torso, and the skin on their hands recovered temperature and bloodflow faster than adults after being exposed to the cold.

So it’s not that kids don’t feel cold at all, but they may have a quite different experience from an adult standing in the same air.

Bodies prepare for what comes next

We often learn about thermoregulation – how the body maintains its core temperature – as though the body were simply a thermostat. The body detects a temperature change, then bloodflow changes, and sweating or shivering bring it back towards the middle.

But our movement and behaviour also play an important role in maintaining this balance. When we’re cold we may walk into sunshine, curl up, or add a layer; when we’re hot we take one off. A child who keeps running may already be generating the warmth they need.

Bodies also prepare for expected demands. Researchers use the term allostasis to describe this wider process of how the body maintains stability through change.

Some adjustments happen automatically. For example, before we exercise, our heart rate and breathing begin adjusting for the work ahead. Others involve choices, such as moving into the sun, seeking shelter or reaching for warmer clothing.

But young children outsource some of this forecasting to adults.

Kids supply the live report from inside their body. We add the weather forecast and the schedule. We pack snacks for hunger that has yet to arrive, spare clothes for puddles yet to be found, and jumpers too.

What the jumper itself feels like

A jumper creates its own sensations. It may feel scratchy, bulky or restrictive. It can make climbing harder, then become hot and sweaty as soon as the child starts running.

Tags, seams and some fabrics can feel intensely unpleasant, especially for children with tactile sensitivities. Clothing tags and light touch, for example, can cause marked discomfort for some autistic children.

A child may genuinely prefer mildly cold skin over an irritating texture.

So it’s worth asking whether “aren’t you cold?” is the right question. Others may work better:

are you comfortable?

will you be running or sitting still?

would you rather wear the jumper or carry it?

These questions help children connect what they feel now with what they may need later.

When should parents insist?

Parents should be firmer when a child is very young, wet, unwell, exposed to strong wind or likely to remain outside for a long time.

Persistent shivering or numbness means it is time to get warm. Increasing clumsiness, unusual drowsiness, confusion or reduced responsiveness can indicate hypothermia, where the body’s core temperature has fallen dangerously low. Hypothermia is a medical emergency.

But for ordinary winter outings, flexible layers allow the plan to change. A jumper can be carried, added when activity slows, and removed when the child warms up again.

Your child reports the weather inside their body. You keep an eye on the weather outside it. A jumper in the bag lets your child feel heard, lets you keep the forecast in view, and lets everyone finally get out the door.

Joshua Pate, Associate Professor of Physiotherapy, University of Technology Sydney

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

Few human experiences are as universal – or as poorly understood – as loneliness.

More than just a blue feeling and the inspiration for countless songs, it’s linked to poorer wellbeing, worse mental and physical health and a higher risk of early death.

Even in the age of social media, we hear of loneliness being on the rise everywhere – to the extent that some have labelled it an epidemic.

To build a better picture, we analysed responses to the Gallup World Poll from more than 218,000 people, across nearly 150 countries. We found around one in five people reported feeling lonely during a typical day.

But that global average masked a stark divide.

In high-income countries, 15.7% of people reported loneliness, including 16.2% in New Zealand and 17.8% in Australia. In low-income countries, by contrast, nearly one in three people (31.3%) reported feeling lonely.

The findings challenge the classic idea that loneliness is simply a private struggle. Instead, they suggest it is also a social condition, influenced by the economic circumstances, institutions and strength of community life.

The global picture

Across the data we analysed, one factor consistently stood out. That was the importance of social capital; the presence of trust and reliable support networks. People who report having others they can depend on are far less likely to feel lonely in every region of the world.

Other factors, such as poor health, unemployment and not having a partner, also played a part. People with more education tended to be less lonely in middle- and high-income countries. That relationship was much weaker in low-income countries, where wider social and economic conditions play a bigger role.

These findings led us to conclude that loneliness can often be the result of a person’s individual circumstances, together with their wider social and economic environment.

But was there evidence of a worsening global loneliness epidemic? While a popular idea, when we looked at data from 113 countries, between 2023 and 2024, we found no clear trend. In fact, just under two thirds of countries appeared to report lower rates in 2024 than 2023.

Again, this wasn’t uniform. While reported rates of loneliness rose significantly in low-income countries, they remained broadly unchanged in middle-income countries and declined in high-income countries.

Importantly, our findings should not be taken to mean loneliness is any less serious. It affects a substantial share of the global population and is strongly linked to poorer wellbeing, emotional distress and a range of adverse health outcomes.

Lessons for tackling loneliness

The consequences of loneliness extend far beyond feeling unhappy. Across all regions and income groups, people who reported loneliness tended to have lower life satisfaction; both in the present and in expectations for the future, though this association is smaller.

They were also far more likely to experience stress, worry, anger and physical pain, and much less likely to report enjoyment in their daily lives. While the strength of these relationships varied, the overall pattern was remarkably consistent across countries.

Our findings also suggest there is no single solution to loneliness. In low-income countries, where loneliness is both more common and increasing, reducing poverty, improving health systems and expanding social protection might all help people build stronger social connections.

In wealthier countries, where loneliness is less common but still affects millions of people, the challenge may be different. Investing in community organisations, public spaces and other opportunities for people to build trusted relationships could prove just as important as expanding mental health services.

More broadly, our findings suggest loneliness should be seen as more than an individual psychological experience. It also reflects the strength of the societies people live in.

That has implications that reach well beyond health. Tackling loneliness has the potential to improve wellbeing, boost productivity and help build stronger, more connected communities.

Dennis Wesselbaum, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Otago and David Leblang, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Virginia

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

Australia is coming under increasing pressure from international drug companies demanding higher prices for their drugs.

In some cases, negotiations have broken down and companies have said they’ll withdraw their drugs from the market. In other cases, companies have said they’ll not apply for their drug to be listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) at all.

For example, the future of some PBS drugs for multiple sclerosis has been in doubt after pricing disagreements between the drug companies and the Australian government. These medicines will now remain on the PBS while a review of multiple sclerosis drugs takes place.

Earlier this year, drug company Eli Lilly said it would not apply to have its drug tirzepatide (Mounjaro) listed on the PBS for type 2 diabetes after price negotiations broke down.

So what’s really going on in the background? And where does that leave Australians’ access to subsidised medicines, now and into the future?

First the UK, then Australia?

United States drug companies have long sought higher prices for their drugs in international markets.

US President Donald Trump has stepped in to blame other countries for forcing drugs companies to accept lower prices.

We were subsidizing others’ healthcare […] it was really the countries that forced Big Pharma to do things that frankly, I’m not sure they really felt comfortable doing [that].

The US-UK trade deal on pharmaceuticals, announced in December 2025, is the first major surrender to this pressure.

In exchange for no tariffs on UK drug exports to the US, it requires the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to increase the price it is willing to pay for new drugs. It also requires the National Health Service (NHS) to double its spending on new drugs by 2036.

The NHS is already squeezed for funds. Extra drug costs will mean cuts to other health care are estimated to lead to up to 291,000 extra deaths by 2036.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence currently approves more than 90% of new drugs it evaluates. So this deal will lead to higher prices, not many more new medicines.

It also creates a worrying precedent for other countries, including Australia.

But negotiations are not just about price

The first step to get a new medicine onto the Australian market is Therapeutic Goods Administration approval. Companies must provide clinical trial evidence of their drug’s effectiveness, either compared to a placebo or another drug. A new drug does not need to be better than existing treatments – just no worse.

Then, the company applies for their drug to be listed on the PBS, and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee – an independent team of experts that evaluates whether drugs are cost-effective and should be recommended for PBS listing – steps in.

It asks companies to compare their drug to standard treatment, in terms of health effects such as quality of life or preventing disability, hospitalisations or death. So price negotiations are not just about price. They are also about whether a new medicine improves health.

Sometimes there is no added health benefit. Analyses of the clinical trial evidence for more than 1,000 new medicine approvals in France found about half were no better and no worse than existing drugs.

If the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee judges a new drug is no better, the allowable price is no higher than existing treatments for the same condition.

But not everyone’s happy.

Felicity McNeill, Chair of the advocacy group Better Access Australia, told the Australian:

In the past, big companies have been able to accept our pricing […] or even the massive price cuts agreed to by the industry, because we were just almost a charity case […].

Australia is hardly a “charity case”. We spend on average about A$1,250 per person per year on prescription and over-the-counter medicines, ranking eighth globally.

Australia subsidises a lower proportion of prescription medicines than many other countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – 48% versus the OECD average of 59%.

But higher PBS prices for subsidised drugs will do little to increase this proportion. That’s because most unsubsidised drugs bought at the pharmacy are older, inexpensive medicines that cost less than a patient’s PBS co-payment. Even if these medicines were to be listed on the PBS, paying for them out-of-pocket would be cheaper.

Patients are weighing in

Patient groups have added their voices to the debate about the future of drugs they say are vital. They’ve shared their fears should multiple sclerosis drugs be removed from the PBS due to price negotiations breaking down.

However, there is little to no evidence of added benefits for these drugs, compared to the newer, more affordable treatment ublituximab (Briumvi). This has led to PBS recommendations for similar pricing.

Many patient groups depend on industry funding. And not all media reporting of patients’ perspectives mention all relevant details about price negotiations.

For example, in recent media reports on the multiple sclerosis drugs, patients do not mention manufacturers’ pricing as a barrier to access. Instead, the focus is only on the potential impact of the government’s price negotiations.

What should Australia do?

Pharmaceutical companies are highly profitable. And much research and development for new drugs is publicly subsidised. Public reimbursement of medicines is also key to equitable and affordable access. So the PBS should not give in to industry bullying.

International drug companies that do not apply for PBS listing or remove existing medicines from the market are likely to remain the exception, not the norm, as they will lose out on sales of their medicines.

If this does happen, there are other options available for Australia to access a needed drug. If a company is selling it elsewhere, Australia can buy it directly from another country via parallel imports.

Under exceptional situations, special access arrangements are also available for patients to access certain drugs that are not available in Australia.

We also need more transparency. Let’s open pricing decisions to public scrutiny. That way, Australians can know if multinational companies are crying poor because of unusually high development and production costs for a specific medicine, or whether these high prices just reflect what they think the market will bear.

Barbara Mintzes, Professor in Pharmaceutical Policy, School of Pharmacy and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney; Ashleigh Hooimeyer, Associate Lecturer, School of Pharmacy, University of Sydney, and Kellia Chiu, Associate Lecturer, School of Pharmacy and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney

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

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) reform bill, now before parliament is the centrepiece of the federal government’s budget savings measures.

It’s the biggest reform the 13-year-old NDIS has faced and aims to ensure the scheme’s sustainability by bringing long-term funding growth down to 5–6% a year.

While a Senate committee inquiry completes its deliberations, the Greens and the cross-benchers are tinkering around the edges of the bill. They’re proposing minor amendments and small carve-outs from the harshest measures.

But they should be aiming higher.

The current bill includes short-term measures that are deeply concerning: a 50% cut to every NDIS participant’s social and community participation supports budget, and a 10% cut to every capacity-building daily activities budget.

These measures should be removed from the bill. These cuts will cause unnecessary harm to disabled Australians and, as our analysis shows, they’re unnecessary. The government can meet its objective of making the NDIS sustainable without them.

What’s been proposed?

An NDIS reform bill needs to pass to ensure the government can get on with necessary structural repairs to the scheme.

The bill includes:

• fixing flaws in the scheme’s design
• increasing consistency in assessing people’s eligibility and setting their budgets
• moving away from over-reliance on markets
• improving governance of the multi-billion-dollar program.

The bulk of the current bill relates to measures that will enable this repair.

What’s proposed for social and community participation budgets?

The government has also targeted social and community participation costs because they have grown faster than the scheme average. But they’re not the fastest-growing support category.

The “support determinations” section of the bill would be used to cut every NDIS participant’s social and community participation supports budget by 50%, and every capacity-building daily activities budget by 10%.

These cuts would be expected to stick: spending in these categories would be lower than it would otherwise be for years to come.

Social and community participation budgets support people to engage in everyday social, recreational, civic and community life and are central to the program’s purpose.

This might include travel training for an intellectually disabled person to build their independence in catching public transport to TAFE, sport or social activities. Or it might mean a support worker accompanying someone to attend a cultural celebration or community group.

What would cuts mean for participants?

These cuts will increase people’s social isolation and place additional burden on families and informal carers, mostly women, who would have to pick up the slack.

These cuts would also strip the most support from the most vulnerable people in the NDIS.

People in supported independent living or specialist disability accommodation, for example, have on average social and community participation budgets more than five times as high as other people in the NDIS. As such, they would lose five times as much support.

These cuts aren’t necessary to meet the government’s target

The government wants to bring NDIS cost growth down to 5–6% a year, from 11.3% in the 12 months to March 2026.

This is a reasonable ambition, and would be similar to growth in other social programs, such as Medicare and aged care.

But this target would be achieved with or without the proposed short-term cuts.

While the short-term cuts would deliver more than a third of the package’s A$37.8 billion savings over the four years to 2029–30, they would do nothing to dampen the long-term growth rate of the NDIS.

A one-off fall in costs

The government’s proposed short-term cuts would have an almost immediate effect on scheme costs, reaching their full impact of about A$4 billion a year by 2028–29.

But after 2028-29, savings from the short-term cuts would plateau. They would increase by only 5% in 2029-30, while savings from the structural reforms would increase by about 60%.

These growth patterns mean the short-term cuts would contribute a shrinking proportion of total savings from the reform package, down from 50% in 2026–27 to 26% in 2029–30.

This plateauing of savings means the impact of the short-term cuts would be a step fall in annual scheme costs, rather than a dampening of the rate of long-term growth.

Sustainability can be achieved without the short-term cuts

According to our calculations, over the next four years (the forward estimates), the full package of proposed reforms would drag NDIS cost growth down to 1.1% a year, a cut in real terms.

Without the short-term cuts, cost growth would be 3% a year. That would still be a real cut in population-adjusted terms, and is well below the government’s target long-term NDIS growth rate of 5–6% a year.

The government has not made the case for the necessity for such deep and blunt cuts in the short term.

In the period after 2029–30, NDIS cost growth under the full package of reforms would be about 5%, from a base cost of $56.2 billion in 2029–30.

Were the bill to be passed with the short-term cuts removed, cost growth would still be about 5%, but from a $4.3 billion higher base cost of $60.5 billion in 2029–30.

Bottom line

Cuts to social and community participation budgets achieve no policy goal, and do nothing to make the NDIS sustainable, while hurting people who rely on these supports to participate in their communities.

The government’s insistence on making these cuts is about shoring up the budget bottom line – but at the expense of some of the most vulnerable Australians. A similarly blunt approach to Medicare or hospital funding would be unthinkable.

Passing the bill with these cuts included would hit the short-term savings target but entirely miss the point.

Sam Bennett, Disability Program Director, Grattan Institute and Owain Emslie, Senior Associate, Disability Program, Grattan Institute

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

In the United States, Google’s (now Alphabet) Debug initiative has asked the federal government for permission to release up to 32 million sterilised male mosquitoes in California and Florida.

Male mosquitoes don’t bite or carry disease. The hope is these millions of male mosquitoes will mate with disease-carrying females, the eggs won’t hatch, and mosquito numbers will fall.

Unsurpringly, the US public has questions about the plan, including whether the release is safe and will work at scale, and what happens afterwards. Google/Alphabet’s plan is to release more than 16 million mozzies each year, for two years.

More than a decade ago, I led a project with Google’s life sciences division, (now known as Verily), to test a novel mosquito-control strategy in far north Queensland.

The results showed releasing specially bred male mosquitoes can dramatically suppress populations of the exotic, invasive mosquito species Aedes aegypti. This species is responsible for spreading deadly diseases such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever. Given the US is seriously considering this approach, our Australian experience offers important lessons.

Using mosquitoes against themselves

This story begins in 2015, when we travelled to Silicon Valley to meet Verily scientists interested in developing a mosquito suppression technology. Their goals aligned closely with our own research, supported by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council grant, to develop environmentally friendly tools for suppressing invasive mosquitoes.

The strategy focuses on male mosquitoes because they don’t bite, and female Aedes aegypti, which generally only mate once during their lifetime. If that mating event was incompatible – meaning the embryos don’t develop – it could not produce viable offspring. Our challenge was to make mating ineffective.

The approach we ultimately tested relied on Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacterium found in many insects. Some Wolbachia strains create a form of reproductive incompatibility, as described above.

The theory is simple: release enough Wolbachia-carrying males into a population and, over time, the population declines. The released males are also beautifully evolved to search and find the last females – their large bushy antennae are super-radars for this job.

North Queensland the perfect laboratory

The Cassowary Coast in north Queensland provided ideal conditions for a large-scale trial of this approach. The region contained towns with abundant Aedes aegypti populations, while surrounding agricultural areas limited movement between communities. Equally important was the support of residents, local government and First Nations leaders.

Aedes aegypti likely arrived in Queensland in the late 1800s. It is distinct from our native mosquitoes because it is highly domesticated and feeds mainly on humans.

Before a single mosquito was released, the project team spent two years conducting field surveys and engaging with communities. We met with households, community organisations, First Nations leaders and local councils to discuss the technology and answer questions. The project, known as “Debug Innisfail”, ultimately received regulatory approval from multiple authorities.

Releasing three million male mosquitoes

Field surveys began in 2015, involving a collaborative team spanning Australian and US institutions. During a 20-week release period in 2018, around three million Wolbachia-carrying male mosquitoes were released into three treatment towns. Meanwhile, control towns where no mosquitoes were released were monitored.

The release system itself reflected Verily’s engineering strengths. The company developed bespoke technologies, including machine-learning-based systems capable of separating male and female mosquitoes, crucial to ensuring only males were released.

The results were striking: when compared with control towns, mosquito populations in towns where mosquitoes were released began declining within four weeks. The findings, published in 2021, demonstrated incompatible male mosquito releases could achieve strong suppression.

In two treatment towns, suppression effects persisted into the following year. In one town, monitoring detected only a handful of Aedes aegypti 12 months later, corresponding to roughly 95% suppression.

What this means for the US

The Australian trials provide evidence-based answers to many of the concerns now being raised in the US.

First, ecological impacts are likely to be very small. Aedes aegypti is an invasive species in Australia and many other countries. Because it exclusively lives around humans and bites them, removing it from urban environments has minimal ecological consequences.

Second, the approach can work at scale. Although adult mosquitoes survive for only a few days, continuous releases of highly competitive males can substantially reduce populations across entire towns.

Third, benefits may persist after releases finish. This is because the suppression outcome does not necessarily disappear straight away, and can carry over into subsequent seasons. But that doesn’t mean mosquito biology can be ignored – success depends on factors such as local ecology, mosquito movement patterns, and community participation. The technology alone is not enough.

A model for future mosquito control

Perhaps the most important lesson from the trials is the value of collaboration. This project brought together researchers from six universities and Verily. Combining scientific expertise with industrial-scale engineering accelerated the journey from laboratory concept to real-world field trial in an incredibly short time.

We are still working towards biological and mechanical approaches to efficiently separating male mosquitoes, which would have better utility in developing countries.

As Aedes aegypti expands its range and insecticides fail to suppress it, using the mosquito against itself as the biological control tool will become increasingly important.

The Queensland trials helped lay the groundwork for programs now underway in the US. And they are a reminder that when science, technology and communities work together, it is possible to solve problems that matter.

Nigel Beebe, Professor, The University of Queensland

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

As we age, low back pain becomes more common. Between the ages 20 and 59, persistent low back pain (lasting more than three months) affects nearly one in five.

While you may be tempted to reach for heat packs, medication or a massage, new evidence suggests that the common advice to go for a swim is much more effective.

Until recently, there was no research to back up this advice. Our new trial shows for the first time that swimming can improve low back pain.

What we did

We recruited 76 adults aged 26 to 74 who experienced persistent and bothersome low back pain for more than three months. They needed to be able to swim 25 meters independently, but didn’t swim regularly.

The participants were randomly allocated to receive either a swimming and education program (the intervention group) or education only (the control group).

The intervention involved an eight-week individualised swimming program, supported by four telehealth sessions with a physiotherapist, and free access to a local indoor or outdoor swimming pool.

The amount of swimming was tailored to each participant’s ability and fitness level, with the goal of completing three 30–45 minute swimming sessions per week by the end of the program. Participants were encouraged to continue swimming after the program completed.

The education, provided by a physiotherapist, aimed to help them better understand their pain, reduce the fear associated with movement and exercise, and increase confidence to manage their back pain.

While many people with back pain believe they should avoid activity to protect their back, a large body of evidence shows remaining active is better.

Participants in the education-only (control) group had one to two sessions with a physiotherapist to cover the same key messages about back pain, but otherwise continued their usual treatment and activity.

What did we find?

Participants in the swimming group reported improved function, less pain and more confidence to manage future back pain.

Their disability reduced by more than 50% at the end of the eight-week program. This could mean that a person improved their ability to do daily activities such as standing from a chair, walking or sleeping.

The swimming group’s improvements were 30% greater than those who received education only (control) group.

Participants told us swimming appealed to them because it was low-impact, it reduced weight-bearing and strain, and it enabled them to exercise more confidently and with less pain. They also reported additional health benefits, including better mood.

Swimming can be used as a way for people with back pain to start exercising and break the cycle of pain and limited activity.

What happened after the program ended?

At the end of the eight-week program, some people kept swimming, others swapped to another form of exercise and some stopped exercising.

Although most participants reported enjoyed swimming, some found accessing a pool and the time required a barrier to keep going in the longer term.

Twelve months after starting the program, there were still benefits for the swimming group for disability, function and confidence. But the difference between groups became smaller over time.

What were the limitations?

Our study’s sample size was relatively small, so these findings need to be confirmed in future, larger studies.

Further trials are also needed to test whether the results still hold for people with more severe or disabling back pain.

Finally, the volunteers in our study knew we were investigating swimming and had positive expectations of swimming before starting. This is a limitation that could affect the findings.

How does swimming compare to other exercises for back pain?

A range of different exercises – including Pilates, functional exercises (a type of strength training that helps you perform daily activities) and structured walking – have been shown to be beneficial for treating disability and preventing low back pain recurrences.

While we didn’t compare swimming to another type of exercise, the benefits we identified were as large or larger than previously reported for other exercises.

People with chronic low back pain can now consider swimming as an evidence-based exercise option and be more confident in choosing it as part of their long-term management.

But if you find it a hassle to get to a pool, or don’t like swimming, it may help get your back pain under control before moving to a type of exercise you prefer or can more easily access.

Mark Hancock, Professor of Physiotherapy, Macquarie University and Deborah Wareham, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Spinal Pain Research Centre, Macquarie University

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

Across Australia, “longevity” and “wellness” clinics, most of them online, sell injections that promise to slow ageing, build muscle, heal injuries and help you sleep.

This week’s ABC 4 Corners described a doctor prescribing a “stack” of them after a short questionnaire and a phone call. Many are peptides.

A peptide is a short chain of amino acids: the tiny building blocks of the proteins in our bodies. A few peptides, such as insulin, are approved medicines.

But the peptides sold at online wellness clinics – with names such as BPC-157, CJC-1295 and TB-500 – aren’t approved, nor are most other “anti-ageing” injections.

None has been shown to have the claimed effects in humans, and the medicines regulator warns they carry real risks.

Some people import a supply for their own use. For some peptides, that is lawful with a valid prescription.

Others are controlled imports that also need an importation permit a patient cannot get. Without the right authority, or if the peptides are sold on, importing them is an offence.

And it doesn’t matter if the substances are labelled “research chemicals, not for human use” if, in substance, they are therapeutic goods. Australian law does not recognise any “research chemicals” exemption.

But others get these substances via online clinics that exploit a legal loophole: these injections are “unapproved” but that doesn’t mean they’re “banned”.

What the medicines regulator does

Before a medicine can be sold in Australia, it usually has to be listed on an official register. To get there, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) – the government body that regulates medicines – must check it is safe, well made and works.

The TGA regulates according to risk, putting its limited resources where the danger is greatest.

But even a real, known risk may draw no regulatory action because it’s another regulator’s job or because acting is resource-intensive, costly and may not achieve the aim of making patients safer.

Either way, the peptides mentioned above have never passed that check. In other words, they’re “unapproved”.

How the clinics get around the rules

Doctors have always been allowed to supply unapproved products in special cases, through the Special Access Scheme and other lawful access pathways.

That way, a patient with a rare cancer, for example, or a child who cannot take an approved medicine, still has options.

But some Australian clinics exploit a different exception. When a pharmacist mixes up a medicine intended for one patient – called compounding – that preparation doesn’t need to be on the register.

The rule was written for cases like a pharmacist making a liquid version of a tablet for someone who cannot swallow.

Making the same recipe in bulk and posting it interstate as injection pens is really manufacturing, which needs a licence.

But because each dose is labelled “for a particular person”, it never faces the TGA’s safety check.

Two regulators, one gap

Australia splits the job of regulating supply of medicines across two regulators, plus consumer law, which can act against misleading claims.

The TGA oversees therapeutic products. It:

• decides what goes on the register
• licenses the manufacturers
• polices the advertising
• can fine or prosecute a business.

But it doesn’t regulate doctors or pharmacists. That falls to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra), which is responsible for a practitioner’s registration.

Ahpra can attach conditions to a practitioner’s registration, suspend them, or take steps to de-register them. But this usually only happens after someone complains, one practitioner at a time.

Ahpra has recently tightened its rules on cosmetic and online prescribing by doctors, so a script can’t be written after just completing a questionnaire. It has also tightened rules for compounding by pharmacists.

But online clinics can slip through a regulatory gap. If the compounded product is notionally exempt, the TGA may not intervene, while the acts of prescribing and compounding fall to Ahpra, which works case by case and can therefore be slow.

Can these injections hurt you?

Yes. The TGA warns you often cannot be sure what is in the vial, whether the dose is right, or whether it is sterile.

Even when pure, these drugs can harm. A single dose of CJC-1295 raises a growth factor, IGF-1, up to three-fold for over a week. High IGF-1 levels are a probable cause of breast cancer.

Peptides and anti-ageing injections are also very costly. A few weeks’ supply can cost more than A$1,000.

When it goes wrong, who’s accountable?

The clearest wins against these businesses have been over their advertising, rather than harm to a patient.

In 2019, the Federal Court fined one company, Peptide Clinics, A$10 million for advertising prescription peptides to the public. It found no real doctor–patient relationship behind the online sales. With a real clinical relationship, the sales would have counted as clinical advice, which the advertising ban does not prohibit.

The company collapsed during the case.

These clinics depend on advertising, and advertising prescription medicines to the public is against the law. So an advertising case can be brought against the whole business, not just one doctor.

Penalties run up to $1.65 million a breach for a person or $16.5 million for a company. But the TGA rarely goes that far.

It usually starts small, warning and educating first, then escalating if that fails.

The TGA also says it cannot chase every breach.

This week, the TGA put suppliers and promoters on notice, admitting repeated warnings have not stopped the peptide trade.

So what needs to change?

We probably don’t need new laws. Refinement of existing laws would do. The options include:

• enforcing the ban on the advertising these businesses depend on

• funding the TGA properly so it can pursue breaches

• narrowing the compounding rule so it cannot work as a bulk manufacturing licence.

The government did this in 2024, removing weight-loss drugs like Ozempic (by then, sold to at least 20,000 Australians by online clinics compounding copies at scale), along with gene therapies and medicinal cannabis. It could do the same for these peptides.

The patients buying these injections are not reckless. They are trying to look after their health. But they may be relying on a promise the clinical evidence cannot support.

Christopher Rudge, Lecturer in Law, Sydney Law School, University of Sydney

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

Choosing a senior maths subject is truly like finding the Goldilocks option. Too difficult, and students may become overwhelmed and underperform. Too easy, and they may miss out on the challenge, preparation or assumed knowledge they require for their future career pathways. They need the subject that is just right.

Across Australia, thousands of students are currently choosing their Year 11 subjects. Students may think they’re just choosing a maths subject, but they are also shaping the university courses and careers most immediately available after school.

For most Year 11 subjects, the choice is relatively straightforward: students either choose chemistry, for example, or they do not. Maths is different, with multiple choices available. This can make subject selection difficult.

Finding the right fit

Let’s start with an important point: not every student should study the most advanced mathematics available.

Research shows choosing a maths subject that is too difficult can increase a student’s anxiety, lower their confidence and reduce their enjoyment of the subject. This may take away from their learning in other subjects or their general enjoyment of their senior years.

Instead, the right maths subject depends on a student’s interests, strengths and future goals.

For some students, a general or standard maths subject will provide the foundational mathematical knowledge they will use throughout their lives and careers. For others, advanced mathematics courses are a better fit.

What unis typically require

For some university courses, particularly in STEM, your senior maths subjects can determine whether you meet entry requirements or arrive with the assumed knowledge needed to succeed.

Many uni degrees in fields such as engineering, physics, computer science, mathematics, and actuarial studies require, or strongly recommend, advanced mathematics. Even when it isn’t a formal prerequisite, students often find first-year university maths requires the knowledge learnt in these subjects.

But what if you’re not looking at a STEM degree — are advanced maths subjects worth your time?

Advanced mathematics isn’t always just about content. Studying the subject develops analytical reasoning, logical thinking, problem solving, and mathematical modelling skills. These are valued across many professions, from economics and finance to business, technology, and data-driven industries.

Support in earlier years

One thing many families often don’t realise is that not all year 10 students will have every senior maths option available to them in years 11 and 12.

Across Australia, schools organise mathematics differently. However, most schools stream students into different maths pathways from as early as the start of Year 7. Those pathways often determine the content students study, and whether they are eligible to take advanced maths courses in the senior years.

This means that, by the time students are choosing their Year 11 subjects, some options may already have become much harder to access.

For families, it is important to ask questions about how maths pathways operate in their child’s school, rather than assuming students can easily access higher levels of maths later.

For students with STEM aspirations who are finding maths difficult in Years 7 to 10, seeking support early is important. Speaking with teachers, understanding pathway requirements, and addressing learning gaps before senior subject selection can help keep more options open.

Other pathways

The good news is there are still options for students to pursue STEM careers later on, even if they don’t study advanced maths in Year 12. Most universities now offer bridging mathematics, foundation studies and enabling programs for students who discover a passion for STEM after leaving school. However, these often involve additional study or a longer route to the same destination.

Some unis are also investing in initiatives that encourage students — particularly girls and students from underrepresented communities — to see themselves in STEM before they even reach Year 11. The path may look different, but the door is rarely locked.

One useful guiding principle for choosing maths subjects in Year 12 is this: students should choose the highest level that keeps future pathways open while remaining realistic about their interest, commitment and prior achievement.

Bronwyn Reid O'Connor, Lecturer in Mathematics Education, University of Sydney and Ben Zunica, Lecturer in Mathematics Education, University of Sydney

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

The senior years of high school can be very stressful. For many students, they are dominated by exams and pressure to gain a certain ATAR for certain university courses.

For some students, perhaps for health or family reasons – this pathway isn’t possible. But this does not mean uni isn’t an option.

Students have historically had to wait until after high school to complete a different pathway such as the Skills for Tertiary Admissions Test, a vocational educational training certificate, portfolio entry or enabling pathway.

Enabling courses can prepare students for undergraduate study. And as our new report shows, it’s possible for students to do an enabling program as part of their high school work.

What are enabling programs?

Enabling programs are courses that qualify students for undergraduate university study. They are also known as “bridging” or “fee-free uni ready” programs.

They teach both academic skills as well as subject knowledge and qualify students to enter a wide range of undergraduate degrees for example education, nursing, science, creative arts and criminology.

Since the 1990s, they have specifically supported students from equity and underrepresented backgrounds, or those with disrupted education.

Many enabling programs are run through universities. So, students complete them after they leave school (sometimes directly after school and sometimes many years after) . But they can also be run in schools, while students are in year 11 or 12.
Each universities has slightly different qualifying criteria for entry into the program based on English competency and school recommendations.

How do enabling programs work in schools?

In 2026, seven universities offer structured in-school programs, targeting regional, remote, and equity cohort schools.

Developed between universities and schools, these programs build academic skills, such as time management, research, academic reading and writing and maths. They can also focus on discipline-specific knowledge and on skills such as confidence and critical thinking.

The curriculum, designed by universities, is embedded in the school timetable in year 11 and 12 and taught by school teachers with university support. Some programs are also on uni campus outside school hours.

These programs are aimed at students who have uni aspirations, but have experienced disadvantage or have not thrived via an ATAR pathway.

Our research

We did an analysis of enabling programs delivered by 94 high schools around Australia. This included surveys of 2,000 students enrolled between 2021 and 2023.

We found 79% of the group completed the program and 660 students progressed to uni in 2022–2024.

Of those who went onto university study, 75% continued into second year. This compares to 79% for ATAR entrants.

At university, students who had done an enabling course had an average pass rate of 76%. recent school leavers who entered uni with an ATAR had an average pass rate of 88%.

What do students say?

In our survey, students repeatedly spoke of being under enormous pressure at school before choosing an enabling pathway. ATAR struggles and stress were a key reason for this. As one student noted:

I struggled a lot with ATAR. I did well in classes and assignments but fell through with the exams.

Another stated:

I dropped out of [the] ATAR [pathway] due to stress and poor mental health, but I still wanted to attend university.

Other students spoke of how the enabling program better suited their particular health or disability needs. One student with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder told us:

I found [school program] more effective […] as the learning was a lot more practical, and the learning and content felt more in-depth.

Students spoke of the program giving them “faith in myself” and a “head start” before they began undergraduate studies. As another student told us, “[the program] explained exactly what universities expect of you”.

What now?

Some politicians have criticised enabling programs in schools, saying they are not challenging enough and do not prepare students for university study. Our findings suggest the opposite.

This study suggests governments and schools need to increasingly recognise there is no single route that suits every student.

One limitation of the study is that this study did not have available data on graduates who went on to study at universities outside the partner institutions.

For schools and universities considering these programs, guidance from our research highlights how the strongest outcomes are linked to programs that are taught within the school timetable. This is because it reduces barriers to attendance and provides support and monitoring from their teachers.

Effective programs also need support from the university partners who provide teacher training and academic guidance. Information for schools on how to set up an enabling program with a university is further explained in our research.

Fiona Navin, Selena Dhondea-Tenakov, Joanne Lisciandro, Johanna Nieuwoudt, Anita Maclaurin, Fabiane Ramos, Shaz Attree and Michael Howie all contributed to the research report described in this article.

Angela Jones, Senior Lecturer Access and Equity, Edith Cowan University

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

Under the Morrison government’s Job-ready Graduates scheme, the price of arts degrees more than doubled to over A$50,000.

But while attention has understandably been focused on undergraduate degrees, what has happened at the postgraduate level?

In a new research paper we explore how the scheme slashed study costs for many postgraduate students, especially in nursing.

‘Full-fee’ versus ‘student contribution’ places

Since the late 1980s, universities have offered domestic students full-fee places in postgraduate courses. Full-fee places receive no government subsidy, and universities set the fees.

In 2024, the average university revenue per full-fee student place was $33,000 a year. Students can finance these fees with a FEE-HELP loan.

Full-fee places exist alongside postgraduate government-subsidised “Commonwealth supported places” (which are also used for undergraduates). For these places, the government provides a subsidy and students pay a price-capped student contribution.

These contributions are high – currently $17,399 a year in arts, business and law – but much less than the average full-fee rate.

Fixed numbers of subsidised postgraduate places

Before Job-ready Graduates, universities could offer postgraduate students Commonwealth supported places. But for each university the government capped numbers in total and by discipline.

By contrast, there were no restrictions around full-fee postgraduate places. As the chart shows, enrolments in full-fee places grew in most, although not all, years up to the mid-2010s.

The two largest postgraduate fields are teaching and business.

This reflected more people seeking to advance their careers through postgraduate study, as well as postgraduate degrees becoming a possible or required entry point for some professions such as psychology.

The cheaper Commonwealth supported places saved students money over full-fee courses, but produced anomalies across the system. Some universities were allocated thousands of places but others only dozens. Frustrated universities complained some competitors had Commonwealth supported places while they could only offer full-fee places in the same course.

Job-ready Graduates and student places

Job-ready Graduates, which was announced in 2020 and started in 2021, changed this situation. Instead of specifically allocating postgraduate Commonwealth supported places, the government put funding into a single, flexible grant shared with undergraduate courses.

For universities and their students this created new opportunities, but also new trade-offs: between undergraduate and postgraduate places, and between subsidised and full-fee postgraduate places.

Framing it differently, universities faced potential choices between opportunities for first and second-time students for government-subsidised higher education, and between lower and higher total revenue per student.

Increased postgraduate Commonwealth supported places was not an inevitable outcome, but it happened.

Between 2019 (the old system’s last normal year) and 2024, the number of postgraduate Commonwealth supported places increased by a third to more than 57,000. By contrast the number of full-fee postgraduate places at public universities fell by 11%, to about 41,000 places.

Which courses benefited?

Growth in postgraduate Commonwealth supported places occurred across many courses. But nursing was a standout, more than doubling to nearly 8,000 places. Specialities such as critical care and mental health nursing showed large increases.

Price differences between subsidised and full-fee places are very large in these fields. For example, for a Graduate Certificate of Critical Care Nursing at Deakin University a full-fee place costs $14,700 in 2026, while a Commonwealth supported place costs just $2,639. The University of Newcastle markets its Master of Mental Health Nursing as up to 75% cheaper, costing $5,117 with Commonwealth support.

Job-ready Graduates cut nursing student contributions to boost demand. While undergraduate nursing demand did increase, a discount was never likely attract students without prior healthcare interests. But for someone who is already a nurse, a cheap Commonwealth supported place could make a big difference to their decision to pursue postgraduate study.

University reasoning

Students prefer lower fees, but this still leaves the question of why universities offered more nursing places.

Our analysis of postgraduate enrolment trends was part of a broader project exploring university decision-making around Commonwealth supported places. As part of this project, we interviewed university leaders and officials.

A consistent theme was they wanted to prioritise postgraduate Commonwealth supported places in social service occupations with relatively low wages, such as nursing, teaching and social work.

Look at undergrad demand

While universities had social service reasons for offering more postgraduate places in certain fields, another important factor affected decision-making under Job-ready Graduates.

This was a major decline in domestic undergraduate demand. Fewer Year 12 students and more people choosing work over study in a strong labour market were both factors.

For many universities, this abolished the trade-off between undergraduate and postgraduate places. They had more funding for Commonwealth supported places than they could use.

Our interview research found universities placed a high priority on fully utilising their government funding. They saw this as a government expectation. They feared that consistent failure to use funding would see it cut. Offering additional postgraduate places was one way to use more government funding.

Can this last?

The social service reasons for offering postgraduate Commonwealth supported places will remain. But with undergraduate demand now recovering, boosted by renewed growth in Year 12 enrolments, the trade-offs with postgraduate places are returning.

At the same time, the government has introduced legislation putting tougher caps on how many Commonwealth supported students universities can take. This will see some universities need to reduce their Commonwealth supported student intake.

We cannot predict exactly how universities will navigate this changed environment. But postgraduate Commonwealth supported places have probably reached their peak as priorities are likely to move back to undergraduate education.

Andrew Norton, Professor of Higher Education Policy, Monash University and Ren-Hao Xu, Lecturer, Graduate School of Education, The University of Western Australia

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

Martin Scorsese recently announced he will be joining generative artificial intelligence (AI) company Black Forest Labs. He said he would embrace AI for storyboarding – the practice of creating a visual outline in the early stages of developing a movie or TV show.

The announcement was met with significant online backlash and sentiments about how AI has the potential to “ruin cinema”.

The announcement follows recent viral footage showing graduate students at multiple college ceremonies booing commencement speakers who praised generative AI. Speaking at the University of Florida, property developer Gloria Caulfield declared AI is “the next Industrial Revolution”. The humanities graduates, already burdened with debt and job insecurity, responded with a torrent of boos.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta were also booed as they sang the praises of AI at graduation ceremonies. Their bemused reactions reflect a growing generational divide when it comes to AI adoption.

Who’s actually enthusiastic about new tech?

It’s often assumed younger generations are the most enthusiastic adopters of new technologies. Yet numerous studies already show gen Z is pushing back against AI.

A recent Gallup study found gen Z is

not convinced that AI enhances creativity or critical thinking, and the majority believe it may come at a cost, particularly to learning.

In contrast, a 2025 Thomson Reuters survey found the most “ambitious group” predicting AI would enter the workplace were baby boomers.

Baby boomers and AI

Baby boomers bridged the gap between analogue technologies like the typewriter and digital innovations like word processors. The labour market was defined by long hours and administrative filing.

This explains why, according to survey data, many boomers see AI as a revolutionary tool. They think AI not only saves time, but is more intuitive than the technologies they once relied upon.

Technology writer Josiah Gogarty argues boomers also find AI amusing. He points to the rise of low-quality AI content or slop on Facebook, “lapped up by the platform’s older audience”.

Yet for younger generations, AI presents an existential threat to their livelihoods.

When booed by the attendant students, Borchetta doubled down: “Deal with it. Do something about it. It’s a tool, make it work for you.”

But his comments ignore the structural conditions that allowed older generations to prosper in ways younger generations cannot. Borchetta and other boomers came of age during a period when human labour carried significantly more economic and social value than it does today.

The very systems that made these individuals wealthy have weakened labour security while removing the professional pathways that allowed them to thrive in the first place. The message “adapt or get left behind” therefore feels disingenuous to a generation now faced with a future defined by constant disruption and reskilling.

Gen Z’s loss of self worth

The issue is not just with a dire job market. Many young people are left feeling as though they no longer have any meaningful stake in a system that demands their compliance while it systematically engineers their obsolescence.

As social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff puts it, we are living in a

harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal market economics in which our sense of self-worth and need for self-determination are routinely thwarted.

Indeed, younger generations face a unique existential crisis as algorithms increasingly shape taste, preferences, decisions and more. Teens are “living inside a contradiction”, encouraged to embrace AI while they report it’s hurting their learning.

In the 20th century, baby boomers had greater agency over how much technology was integrated into their lives, and there was more opportunity to opt out. Studies show older generations were able to evaluate their adoption of technology based on factors like “compatibility with lifestyle” and affordability. Email and mobile phones weren’t viewed as essential to everyday life, nor was upgrading to a clock radio or a TV with a remote control considered as “inevitable” as having an AI chatbot on your smartphone is today.

Today, AI and algorithms feel unavoidable to younger generations, because they’re built into the very fabric of society. Tech CEOs argue the dominance of AI is inevitable, but the people in power aren’t engaging in dialogue with younger generations.

In an age when it feels as though we’ve resigned ourselves to a future determined by AI and algorithms, younger generations now want to reclaim agency over their futures, rather than just blindly embrace AI.

The vocal gen Z backlash against AI should be a reminder to everyone that alternatives to an AI-saturated future are still possible.

Siobhan Lyons, Scholar in Media and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University

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

Today, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese laid out how his government plans to manage artificial intelligence (AI) and ensure the rapidly advancing technology works in Australia’s interest.

In a major speech at the University of Sydney, Albanese declared that AI “is a bigger challenge and a bigger opportunity than social media”, and that Australia must move now to determine its “social licence” and capture the opportunities it presents.

Key to the government’s plans is the immediate establishment of an Office of AI within the prime minister’s own department and the creation of new national standards for AI.

This news comes as a group of leading economists and AI researchers urge policymakers and tech companies around the world to prepare now for how the technology could reshape the global economy on a much bigger and faster scale than the Industrial Revolution did.

A new office and new standards

Albanese said the new Office of AI will coordinate AI policy across government, rather than leaving individual departments to develop their own approaches. This will be similar to how the government developed coordinated approaches for other significant technologies such as civil aviation and genetics.

The office will also help coordinate the design of new national standards for AI.

These standards, which Albanese said will be legislated early next year, will build on the government’s previously announced expectations for data centres. They will, for example, create a new legal obligation for large data centre operators to underwrite their own power supply, not increase household power prices, and minimise water usage.

Other countries are also grappling with how best to handle this issue. Indeed, hours before Albanese’s speech, New York enforced a one-year moratorium on the building of new data centres.

There are growing calls for Australia to do the same.

But Albanese suggested his government would not be heeding these calls. As he said:

No government can turn back the clock or press pause on all of this. Nor would we want to. That would only mean cutting ourselves off from the opportunities that are there to be seized.

Protection for artists and creative industries

Albanese also reiterated his government’s commitment to the “strongest possible protection” for artists, musicians and journalists, who should retain ownership and control of their works in the AI age.

Last year the Labor government rejected a copyright exemption that would allow AI companies to use protected content for free when developing AI models.

In contrast to other jurisdictions (such as the United States, European Union and Japan), Australian AI developers will still have to pay for creators’ content.

This approach is fair. But the government has since been grappling with how to ensure this policy does not disadvantage Australian AI developers and the payments reach actual creators.

In his speech today, Albanese promised laws to address this. But he did not provide any clarity on what they might look like.

Where does Australia sit internationally?

By establishing the AI Office and developing national standards for AI, Australia is trying to position itself as an international leader in AI policy.

But Albanese’s claim that Australia “will be the first country in the world to bring [AI] issues into a single, national framework” is overstated.

For example, the European Union adopted the AI Act back in 2024. This established strict regulation especially for high-risk AI. It also established the EU AI Office to coordinate the implementation of the AI Act and protect people against the risks of the technology.

This year, however, the EU Commission introduced amendments to weaken some of the requirements in the AI Act and postponed certain implementation deadlines.

This “watering down” of the AI Act is intended to boost AI innovation in the EU. It comes after AI developers have been complaining that strict EU regulation slows down AI development.

Other countries seem to also favour a pro-innovation approach, instead of strong regulation. South Korea, for example, has introduced an AI Basic Act for high impact AI systems, but its rules are much less strict than in the EU.

Japan has opted for voluntary guidance for the AI sector.

So Australia’s decision not to introduce hard regulation (such as mandatory AI guardrails) but rather rely on softer standards and national-level coordination appears to align with international trends.

A starting point

The new standards and office announced today are a good starting point for managing AI. So too is Albanese’s promise to protect creative industries whose content has been used by AI companies to train their large language models without consent.

However, we don’t yet know how, or how well, the government will do this.

Much more work and leadership from the government is needed – especially in relation to mitigating the wide array risks of AI, from misinformation and deceptive deep-fakes, anti-democratic propaganda, health AI apps causing health safety issues, and public security challenges.

And while the government hopes its new AI standards will allay community fears about data centres, the news out of New York is likely to only fuel the push in Australia to hit “pause” on them.

Rita Matulionyte, Associate Professor in Law, Macquarie University

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

I remember watching an interview with actor Sam Neill, who has died aged 78, saying “Good screen acting hints at secrets. At other lives underneath the veneer.”

At the time, I wondered what were these secrets Neill was referring to.

I just had to look at the vast body of Neill’s work, the characters he played, and how he played them to answer that question.

Claiming him as Australian

The actor was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in 1947 in Northern Ireland before moving to New Zealand as a child. In the time-honoured tradition of Australia claiming New Zealand talent as our own, it was when he made the move across the pond that he first found fame and the launching pad for his international career.

A law school dropout, he soon found acting to be his calling while at university, acting in a number of plays before moving to New Zealand television and his first starring role in the action thriller feature Sleeping Dogs (1977).

This film got him noticed in Australia where he picked up a small role in television series The Sullivans before landing his first major motion picture – My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite another emerging talent of the Australian screen, Judy Davis.

He made a plethora of less widely known films like Just Out of Reach (1979) and Attack Force Z (1982), while also appearing in television shows such as Young Ramsey.

His international break out film was, unusually, playing the son of Satan in the quite schlocky Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981).

But the film was commercially successful, and the role opened up many doors for Neill who spent the rest of his professional career criss-crossing continents and acting in films and television series in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and his original home, New Zealand.

As often happens with our Australian talent, they have to be recognised overseas before we recognise them back home.

So back in Australia we came to embrace Neill in landmark films such as playing Micheal Chamberlain opposite Meryl Streep in Evil Angels (1988) and opposite a young Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989).

At this time, he met with producer Cubby Broccoli to be considered as the replacement for Roger Moore in the James Bond series, but unfortunately lost out to Timothy Dalton.

Neill may have been the greatest Bond we never had.

The actor who didn’t show he was acting

Perhaps the role he is best remembered for is as the star of the original Jurassic Park (1993) and sequels Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), where he played renowned palaeontologist Alan Grant.

This role is a great example of how refined his acting talents were.

At the beginning of Jurassic Park, Grant is quite aloof and cold to those around him, and visibly uncomfortable around the park owner’s grandchildren. As the drama unfolds, Grant gradually shifts to becoming the children’s protective mentor risking his life for them.

Neill doesn’t do this through dramatic speeches or over-the-top visual displays. Instead he gives us a performance of subtle shifts in the character’s behaviour.

Neill’s ability at nuance made his roles so believable and authentic.

When we view his body of work, we can see Neill’s characters always have a significant level of intellect and astuteness. He was often cast in roles of men of intelligence, quiet authority or class. Neill was the reasonable, decent man everyone looked at for stability and strength when disaster fell, and all others were losing their heads.

He had this understated quality to many of his roles. Not being the overt method actor like many of his generation, he chose restraint and reason, embellishing his characters with a feeling of genuine realism.

Neill was able to relate emotion through slight facial expressions or minute vocal inflections. He could be equally delighted, menacing or upset with just a glance.

The quality of the man

Neill took many risks with the roles he took on. His versatility and range meant he could be equally good in a historical drama (Sirens, 1994) as he was in a comedy (Death in Brunswick, 1990) or even horror (In the Mouth of Madness, 1994) and sci-fi (Event Horizon, 1997).

It shows the quality of the man that Neill was as willing to appear in blockbusters as he was in small, independent films, to help and coach the next generation of filmmakers.

In ironic casting, the Sam Neill who dropped out of law school to become an actor played his final role as a lawyer, in the acclaimed three seasons of the Australian courtroom series The Twelve (2022–25).

In 2023, Neill said “I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me”.

For him it may have been annoying. Those who admired him will be meeting this moment with profound sadness and gratitude for the exceptional work he leaves behind.

Neill uncovered the secrets in the lives of all of his characters, presented them to us in his own inimitable style and made even the most ordinary moments feel quietly extraordinary.

Daryl Sparkes, Senior Lecturer, Media Studies and Production, University of Southern Queensland

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

Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries. Modern historians have generally assumed they were housekeepers, in charge of domestic tasks and household meals, and segregated from the productive business of the farm.

My new paper, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, challenges this assumption.

In fact, there is evidence to suggest that many Roman female farm managers supervised wine production and other processes vital to farming and profits.

A false lead

A farming manual written by the Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella in the 1st century CE is a window to the roles of the female manager.

An upper class landowner himself, Columella lists the responsibilities of farm managers, who were probably enslaved. The male manager was termed the vilicus, and the female manager the vilica, terms derived from their roles at the “villa”.

But many historians reading this text have been side-tracked by a false lead: Columella begins his section on the vilica with a long quote from the Greek philosopher Xenophon, who wrote in Athens more than four centuries earlier.

The “natural” role of women, according to Xenophon, was to work indoors. Therefore in his discussion, the ideal upper-class married woman is depicted staying inside her town house to supervise the domestic work of the slaves.

The Greek writer is not discussing farm workers. In fact, Columella says four times that these ideas are not his own, but those of Xenophon, writing long ago.

Columella lists a completely different set of responsibilities for the vilica on a Roman farm: most importantly, the making of wine and olive oil, which were highly valuable commodities – the backbone of landowners’ profits.

In his description of the vilica’s duties, Columella includes the extraction of the juice from grapes during the harvest; adding flavourings and preservatives such as salt, wormwood, fennel or boiled grape-juice; and overseeing successful fermentation into wine.

According to Columella, the vilica also managed the processing of other farm products to make them long-lasting and profitable, such as turning inedible olives into olive oil for sale.

From archaeology we know that production of wine or oil, using huge machines in substantial buildings, could reach 50,000 to 100,000 litres per year, or even more. The vilica was therefore responsible for overseeing large-scale work essential to the operation of the estate.

Calling on the gods

Correct sacrifices to the gods were seen as vital to the success of the farm. Archaeology has uncovered altars for offerings in Roman wine-making buildings.

Wine-making in the Roman world was a precarious process, due to uncontrolled temperatures, bacteria or oxygenation. Wine could easily go mouldy or turn into vinegar.

A striking element of Columella’s account is that he includes carrying out offerings to avert such a disaster in his instructions for the female farm manager.

Looking for more clues

Other texts contain barely more than a mention of the vilica, revealing only her presence.

But we can still put together some clues.

Legal writings on inheritance, quoting the 1st century BCE jurist Trebatius, include her in the instrumentum fundi – whatever (including enslaved personnel) is required for productive work, gathering and preserving produce of the estate.

Another aristocratic landowner and writer, Cato the Elder, living two centuries before Columella, lists both the female and the male farm manager as essential staff for a vineyard or olive farm.

He devotes only one small section to outlining the female farm manager’s tasks, but a close look shows these are not predominantly domestic. Cato includes keeping poultry and processing of seasonal farm products. Although he does include supervision of cleaning, this could refer to maintenance of work spaces such as stables and wine making buildings, an integral part of estate management – and also listed by Columella among the vilica’s duties.

Cato also gives the vilica the responsibility for making sacrifices to the gods for the success of the farm. She must regularly offer garlands at the altar “for abundance”, he writes.

A Roman mosaic showing estate work in different seasons depicts a scene of sacrifices for abundant crops to the god Jupiter (in his Celtic form as a sky and weather god). A woman is shown holding an offering of garlands, just as Cato instructs. Beside her are a jug for wine offerings and a male figure.

Perhaps this mosaic shows the vilica and vilicus, both essential to the success of annual harvests. While such images of female figures are rare, one fragmentary wall painting from Rome shows a female overseeing wine-making workers, just as Columella describes.

This combined body of evidence suggests we should expand outdated understandings of the roles that Roman women played in farm production, the dominant sector of ancient economies.

No vilica has left us an account of her work in her own words. But by paying careful attention to the evidence, we can hear an echo of her voice.

Tamara Lewit, Honorary Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne

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

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has vowed to protect Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists, saying they “must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out plain as day.”

In his speech on AI, delivered at the University of Sydney, he said:

no company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work […] Anything less, is theft

The best way, he said, to secure the strongest copyright protections for Australian artists was “for Australia to be active and involved”. But while these are strong words, he did not spell out what action his government would take. Meanwhile, creators are already having their work plundered.

How will his government legislate to protect Australian ownership of Australian work? Will it act on thefts that have already taken place?

What could be done

There are two main courses of action the federal government can pursue to protect Australian creators’ work. One is legislative and the other is legal.

In Australia, unlike other jurisdictions, copyright is automatic for Australian creators and covered by the 1968 Copyright Act. There have been relatively few updates to this legislation, despite major changes in technology.

For example, loading content such as books into AI is often a breach of copyright, but it is common practice, including among university students.

It would be possible to amend the legislation to allow uploads, so long as creators received payment for the associated training the large language model (LLM) gains from the upload. This could work in a similar way to the system where copyright holders receive payment when their work is used in student readers.

Some arts groups are “encouraged” by Albanese’s speech. The Australian Society of Authors chair, Jennifer Mills commended the government

for sticking to its principles and seeing the value of Australian authors and Australian stories. Our rights as creators must be defended. Now big tech needs to come to the table and accept the facts.

The problem is that AI companies effectively have all the licence they need to breach Australian copyright, since no coordinated action is underway to address the existing scraping of Australian copyright material to train LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude.

This is not for lack of evidence. In 2025, the Atlantic published an online database of works that had been scraped by AI companies. Local authors were quick to discover their works had been a part of that process.

Taking action against multinational companies is not new ground in Australia. To name just one recent example, attorney-general Michelle Rowland announced the government would sue US manufacturer 3M over its use of forever chemicals.

Such lawsuits are a reminder that powerful tech companies are not beyond answering for their actions. The federal government could, for instance, launch a lawsuit against a tech company on behalf of creators whose copyright has been breached.

Lawsuits are happening in other countries. In the US, publishers have just launched a lawsuit against Google, alleging it has illegally copied works to train its Gemini AI product.

The theft continues

No other country, said Albanese, had “got it right” in protecting creators “when it comes to AI training”. Australia will “build the best possible solution for ourselves”.

But any claims that Australia is “active and involved” are little more than hot air without action on the existing thefts of Australian material and a program for compensation. The latter could potentially take the form of an agreement brokered between the government and tech companies to pay creators for work that has been used in LLM training.

It’s worth remembering, too, that there is already a body looking after copyright payments for Australian writers. Under current arrangements, Australians registered with the Copyright Agency receive a payment based on a survey it conducts determining how many times their work has been copied without recompense. This covers school and university readers and government use.

At the moment, there is no such payment from any AI company as compensation for the work these companies have used to train LLMs. There is no reason why this agency could not be involved with the development of a new system to tackle AI companies.

While Australia might self-identify as a small or relatively insignificant country, federal legislation, from the media bargaining code to the under-16 social media ban (leaving to one side deliberations on its efficacy), is making us a world leader on some tech issues.

And while there is hot air on copyright, the government has promised to “speed up approvals” on data centres. The imbalance is clear: data centres are getting support and copyright creators are not.

Alice Grundy, Visiting Fellow, School of Literature, Language and Linguistics, Australian National University

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

I remember watching an interview with actor Sam Neill, who has died aged 78, saying “Good screen acting hints at secrets. At other lives underneath the veneer.”

At the time, I wondered what were these secrets Neill was referring to.

I just had to look at the vast body of Neill’s work, the characters he played, and how he played them to answer that question.

Claiming him as Australian

The actor was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in 1947 in Northern Ireland before moving to New Zealand as a child. In the time-honoured tradition of Australia claiming New Zealand talent as our own, it was when he made the move across the pond that he first found fame and the launching pad for his international career.

A law school dropout, he soon found acting to be his calling while at university, acting in a number of plays before moving to New Zealand television and his first starring role in the action thriller feature Sleeping Dogs (1977).

This film got him noticed in Australia where he picked up a small role in television series The Sullivans before landing his first major motion picture – My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite another emerging talent of the Australian screen, Judy Davis.

He made a plethora of less widely known films like Just Out of Reach (1979) and Attack Force Z (1982), while also appearing in television shows such as Young Ramsey.

His international break out film was, unusually, playing the son of Satan in the quite schlocky Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981).

But the film was commercially successful, and the role opened up many doors for Neill who spent the rest of his professional career criss-crossing continents and acting in films and television series in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and his original home, New Zealand.

As often happens with our Australian talent, they have to be recognised overseas before we recognise them back home.

So back in Australia we came to embrace Neill in landmark films such as playing Micheal Chamberlain opposite Meryl Streep in Evil Angels (1988) and opposite a young Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989).

At this time, he met with producer Cubby Broccoli to be considered as the replacement for Roger Moore in the James Bond series, but unfortunately lost out to Timothy Dalton.

Neill may have been the greatest Bond we never had.

The actor who didn’t show he was acting

Perhaps the role he is best remembered for is as the star of the original Jurassic Park (1993) and sequels Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), where he played renowned palaeontologist Alan Grant.

This role is a great example of how refined his acting talents were.

At the beginning of Jurassic Park, Grant is quite aloof and cold to those around him, and visibly uncomfortable around the park owner’s grandchildren. As the drama unfolds, Grant gradually shifts to becoming the children’s protective mentor risking his life for them.

Neill doesn’t do this through dramatic speeches or over-the-top visual displays. Instead he gives us a performance of subtle shifts in the character’s behaviour.

Neill’s ability at nuance made his roles so believable and authentic.

When we view his body of work, we can see Neill’s characters always have a significant level of intellect and astuteness. He was often cast in roles of men of intelligence, quiet authority or class. Neill was the reasonable, decent man everyone looked at for stability and strength when disaster fell, and all others were losing their heads.

He had this understated quality to many of his roles. Not being the overt method actor like many of his generation, he chose restraint and reason, embellishing his characters with a feeling of genuine realism.

Neill was able to relate emotion through slight facial expressions or minute vocal inflections. He could be equally delighted, menacing or upset with just a glance.

The quality of the man

Neill took many risks with the roles he took on. His versatility and range meant he could be equally good in a historical drama (Sirens, 1994) as he was in a comedy (Death in Brunswick, 1990) or even horror (In the Mouth of Madness, 1994) and sci-fi (Event Horizon, 1997).

It shows the quality of the man that Neill was as willing to appear in blockbusters as he was in small, independent films, to help and coach the next generation of filmmakers.

In ironic casting, the Sam Neill who dropped out of law school to become an actor played his final role as a lawyer, in the acclaimed three seasons of the Australian courtroom series The Twelve (2022–25).

In 2023, Neill said “I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me”.

For him it may have been annoying. Those who admired him will be meeting this moment with profound sadness and gratitude for the exceptional work he leaves behind.

Neill uncovered the secrets in the lives of all of his characters, presented them to us in his own inimitable style and made even the most ordinary moments feel quietly extraordinary.

Daryl Sparkes, Senior Lecturer, Media Studies and Production, University of Southern Queensland

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

It was May 1999 and Derryn Hinch had been called into the manager’s office at Adelaide’s 5DN. The ratings for his morning program had been tumbling, and after less than a year on air he was told to pack his things.

At the time, I was writing a profile of him for The Australian newspaper and happened to be in his office as he gathered his belongings. He told me that after the station manager broke the news he responded with two demands: the biggest possible payout, and the right to tell the press the truth about why he’d been sacked.

According to Hinch, 5DN offered him an “out” to give to the media. The station was happy to say he’d resigned to write a book. But Hinch was having none of it. “Nothing annoys a journo more than being bullshitted,” he said.

As well as being the “human headline”, Hinch was known for his towering ego and unfailing tabloid news sense. But those who knew him well also say he was a straight shooter, immensely likeable and, as he demonstrated after his fifth sacking in seven and a half years, also disarmingly self-deprecating.

“I’ve been to more stations than the Southern Aurora,” he joked.

Principled, in his own way

I first met Hinch in the early 1990s in the studios of Channel Ten, where he’d taken his eponymous current affairs program after it had been dropped by Channel Seven. He let me observe the production process for a documentary for Radio National’s Media Report.

Frankly, some of what I saw behind the scenes was shocking, including one of the program’s reporters faking footage because they’d got to a story late and missed the action they were there to cover.

But the most memorable moment was sitting next to Derryn as he wrote his tub-thumping nightly editorial with which he famously began each show.

That night he was accusing a judge of being too lenient because he’d given a sex offender a light sentence. As I watched him pounding away on the keyboard, I noticed his source was a three-paragraph news brief on a ripped-up piece of newspaper sitting on his desk.

I questioned whether he knew enough about the case to be so judgemental? Perhaps the judge might know more about the circumstances of the case than he did? Perhaps a light sentence was appropriate in this case?

No way, replied Hinch. Too many judges are too lenient, they all need to toughen up, too many offenders are getting away with appalling crimes. I asked whether he had sought a comment from the judge himself. Of course not, he replied, there’s no point doing that, they won’t talk to the Hinch program.

That was Hinch. Endlessly outraged and untroubled by the norms of balanced or considered reporting. But also principled in his own way, especially on the issue of sex crimes and the abuse of children.

It was the cause for which he was imprisoned in 1987 for contempt of court after disclosing the prior convictions of paedophile Catholic priest Michael Glennon, who was then facing trial. He was also convicted of contempt of court in 2011 after defying several suppression orders, and sentenced to home detention. And he was convicted again in 2014 for detailing the criminal history of the man who murdered Melbourne woman Jill Meagher.

Hinch’s friend and colleague Steve Vizard – who regularly impersonated Hinch as a bearded zealot crying “shame, shame, shame” down the barrel of a camera – told ABC Radio today that Hinch’s disregard for the legal process increased the possibility of guilty sex offenders walking free.

“If you derail a trial you’re inflicting your own verbal punishment in substitute to proper legal punishment,” he said.

However ill-conceived it was, Hinch’s commitment to the cause was heartfelt and drove his move into politics at the age of 72 as a senator for Victoria between July 2016 and June 2019.

A series of short-lived stints

Hinch was born in New Zealand and worked for the Taranaki Herald before moving to Australia to become police roundsman for the Sydney Sun. He later edited the paper after 11 years working in the United States and Canada.

In 1978 he worked for Melbourne radio station 3XY before joining 3AW as the morning presenter the following year.

In 1987, Seven’s then owner Christopher Skase walked into his office and told him “I want to make you the Walter Cronkite of Australia”. The idea appealed to Hinch’s outsized ego and soon his racy current affairs program was born.

In 1992 he moved to Network Ten, but that only lasted two years before he was recruited by Nine to present the Midday Show.

Sacked after just a year, he moved to 2GB, which also fell apart quickly, as did a stint at Melbourne’s Gold FM and then Adelaide’s 5DN.

His ratings in Adelaide had fallen to just 4.5%, suggesting he’d either lost his once-famous tabloid news sense or that he was too “eastern states” for Adelaide listeners.

On that occasion, Hinch was sanguine. He conceded he had no one to blame but himself, unlike his dismissal from 2GB, which he attributed to a falling out with owner John Singleton.

At the time, his longtime friend and former producer, Paul Barber, concluded that Hinch’s saturation coverage meant he had gone the way of TV personalities such as Bert Newton and Don Lane. “People become so totally over-exposed that the public become exhausted and doesn’t bother anymore, we’re all becoming Derryn’d out.”

But apparently not.

Bombastic but genuine

In February the following year, 3AW called a press conference to announce that Hinch was back, as the presenter of the station’s popular Nightline program.

At the press conference, I asked him whether he was still drinking heavily. It seemed like an appropriate question as this was the sort of thing he routinely asked others and because his excessive drinking had been a theme throughout his career. His excessive alcohol consumption would be the primary cause for the cancer and cirrhosis of his liver which led to a liver transplant a decade later.

Despite this, he assured the media he had his drinking and infamous long lunches under control.

His return to 3AW made him the surprise winner of the cash-for-comment scandal that had rocked the commercial radio industry, especially Sydney’s 2UE, and had claimed the scalp of longtime 3AW presenter Bruce Mansfield.

Hinch knew he was lucky to be back and had even accepted a smaller salary. He promised not to waste the opportunity, but it too didn’t last long.

Today, former colleagues and friends have spoken about Hinch with great fondness. They agree that unlike the fearsome public persona he once had, he was in fact extremely likeable.

Up close he was personable, a superb listener and, most endearingly, open to criticism and scrutiny. He was quite used to the rest of the media criticising him for his tabloid style and didn’t seem to mind it at all.

His longstanding and always-busy lawyer, Nic Pullen, told ABC Radio Hinch was bombastic and larger than life, but also humane and genuine. It’s these traits that makes his death at age 82 “a sad day for Australian journalism”.

Andrew Dodd, Professor of Journalism, The University of Melbourne

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

Melatonin is best known for helping us sleep. But a new study suggests it might have another surprising use: easing muscle and joint pain.

Produced naturally by the pineal gland in the brain at night, melatonin helps regulate the body’s sleep-wake cycle. That’s why this hormone is widely used as a treatment for insomnia and jet lag.

Sleep and pain are closely linked (poor sleep can make pain feel worse, and pain can make sleep harder). But melatonin may also reduce pain directly. Researchers believe it dampens pain signals in the brain and spinal cord, reduces inflammation, calms overactive nerves and protects cells from oxidative stress – the cellular wear and tear caused when harmful molecules build up.

In the new study, researchers combined the results of 23 clinical trials involving over 2,000 participants to identify overall patterns. These trials looked at melatonin for long-term muscle and joint pain as well as pain after surgery.

Overall, melatonin reduced both pain and sleep problems in people with chronic muscle and joint pain. But the improvements were modest. On average, pain scores fell by about nine points on a 100-point scale. That’s within the range reported for some anti-inflammatory drugs in similar studies, although the two treatments haven’t been directly compared.

Melatonin’s effects may also depend on whether people already have sleep problems or other long-term health conditions. Most of the chronic pain studies included people who already had poor sleep to begin with, but none of the trials looked at results separately for people with and without sleep issues. Because of this, it’s unclear whether melatonin works better for people who struggle with sleep or whether the effects are similar for everyone.

The findings were much less convincing for pain after surgery. Melatonin did not make a noticeable difference to pain or sleep. One analysis found a tiny improvement (about 2.5 points on a 100-point pain scale), but this is far below what would matter to patients recovering from surgery.

The benefits in chronic muscle and joint pain are modest. Based on the current evidence, melatonin should be seen as a possible add-on treatment rather than a replacement for established therapies. The evidence suggests melatonin could complement treatments such as physiotherapy, exercise and anti-inflammatory medicines rather than replace them.

What we still don’t know

There is also still a lot we don’t know. The trials in this study used a wide range of doses, from 1mg to 10mg, and the researchers couldn’t determine which dose worked best.

There were hints that longer treatment helped more in chronic pain, but this was based on only a few studies. There is also very little evidence on the effectiveness of higher doses, even though they appear safe in other studies.

Melatonin is widely used and generally considered safe for short-term use, but it can cause side-effects, such as daytime sleepiness, dizziness, headaches and nausea.

People with liver or kidney conditions, or those with autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, should speak with a doctor or pharmacist before taking it.

It is also worth noting that melatonin is regulated very differently around the world. In the US, melatonin is sold as a dietary supplement, meaning people can buy it easily in supermarkets and online without medical advice. But in the UK, melatonin is a prescription-only medicine and is only licensed for short-term sleep problems and jet lag.

For now, the findings suggest melatonin may offer modest relief for some people with chronic muscle and joint pain, particularly if poor sleep is part of the problem. It’s unlikely to replace established treatments, but it could eventually earn a place alongside them. Larger, well-designed trials will be needed before doctors can say with confidence who is most likely to benefit.

Dipa Kamdar, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University

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

It begins with a follow request. An 18-year-old male accepts one on Instagram from an attractive female stranger. She likes his posts, messages him first, friendly, flattering, quick to move the chat to a messaging app.

Within an hour she has shared an intimate image and asked for one in return. The moment he sends it, the flirtation stops: pay, or his image goes to his mother and every friend the blackmailer has found on his profile. A countdown begins.

This is a fictional scenario, but in 2025 the eSafety Commissioner received more than 3,300 reports of sexual extortion or “sextortion”. The vast majority of reports were made by male victims.

A national survey by the Australian Institute of Criminology found more than one in ten Australian adolescents have experienced sexual extortion, over half of them before they’d turned 16. Two in five were targeted with digitally manipulated material, and two-thirds by someone they had only ever met online.

In addition, new national research published last week found that among young people who had sexual images shared without consent, one in four said AI was involved.

eSafety’s latest transparency report, released today, draws on answers platforms must provide under Australia’s Online Safety Act. It reveals many platforms are still not using available tools to detect this crime. Yet sexual extortion is arguably the most predictable serious crime on the internet. It follows a script.

A crime that follows a script

Sextortion is a form of blackmail in which someone threatens to share a nude or sexual image (real or AI-fabricated), unless the victim pays or provides more intimate material. When the target is under 18, it is child sexual exploitation.

Offenders – frequently organised criminal networks overseas – work through a well-documented sequence. First contact usually happens on social media before the conversation is moved to another service, such as Snapchat or WhatsApp. The offender fast-tracks trust by sharing an intimate image, sometimes using images taken from earlier victims.

Once the target shares their image, the demands begin, often with countdowns engineered to cause panic. Meanwhile the offender searches their social accounts for family and friends to threaten to contact.

Each stage leaves linguistic “fingerprints”. eSafety’s investigators have compiled the gangs’ most common scripts, language indicators and recycled fake imagery, and supplied them directly to the major platforms.

The pattern is so recognisable, eSafety built a public campaign around it. “If sextortionists were honest”, launched in June, uses AI-generated characters to act out the script in advance so young men can spot it in their own messages.

If a short video can teach a teenager to recognise a sexual extortion script, why can’t the largest tech companies teach their systems to do the same?

What the report shows

The new report puts sexual extortion at its centre and shows the detection gap persists across all seven providers.

In the second half of 2025 alone, eSafety received more than 2,000 sexual extortion complaints: men aged 18 to 24 were the largest cohort, and Instagram and WhatsApp the services most named.

Yet Instagram used no language analysis in private messages. It relies on user reports, even though Meta removed end-to-end encryption from private messages in May this year, clearing the way for detection tools.

WhatsApp – where messages are encrypted – used none either and offered no dedicated way to report sexual extortion.

Apple’s iMessage also used none. Its nudity-blurring Communication Safety feature can’t detect extortion scripts or threats and is on by default only for self-declared under-18s.

Snapchat ran language analysis only on material reported by users and did nothing proactive, even on the unencrypted parts of its service. Discord used no language analysis at all, despite most of its service not being encrypted. Google used none on Messages or Gmail.

Microsoft illustrates both the possibility and the failure: it uses language analysis to detect sexual extortion on Xbox, yet applies no equivalent tools on Teams.

If a service encrypts messages, it can make proactive detection of sextortion scrips difficult, although not impossible. And it can’t explain the detection gap on unencrypted services like Instagram, Discord, Gmail, Teams, or the parts of Snapchat that are not end-to-end encrypted.

When blackmail occurs in plain text, the barrier to detection is simply the platform’s priorities.

Where to from here?

Three steps would make an immediate difference.

First, platforms should deploy language analysis across every unencrypted service. It should be calibrated to protect both children and adults, using the indicators eSafety has already supplied. The regulator has collected the threat intelligence for them.

Second, detection should trigger intervention. If the victim receives a warning or interruption at certain moments the script predicts, it can interrupt the crime and redirect them to receive support. A legislated digital duty of care would make such safety-by-design a legal obligation rather than an optional extra.

Design matters, as the report found only 0.3% of teens who received Snapchat’s warning about a risky contact chose to block or report. However, good warning message design can work, and such interventions must be evaluated and continuously improved, not just switched on.

Third, companies need to share more information across platforms. This crime deliberately migrates between services – for example, from Instagram to WhatsApp (both owned by Meta) – precisely to exploit the gaps between them.

Social media and messaging platforms should share more threat intelligence across sectors such as finance, which is more regulated and has stronger connections to law enforcement. Currently, that’s not happening at a level needed to disrupt the criminal networks of sextortion.

Sexual extortion announces itself in plain text. The playbook has been recorded, studied, and delivered to the companies that host the crime. Detecting it does not require a breakthrough, but a decision to act.

Joel Scanlan, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Law; Academic Co-Lead, CSAM Deterrence Centre, University of Tasmania

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

Phones and devices have become inextricably linked with everyday life. They store our credit cards, provide critical bus updates, and allow us to communicate whenever we need to.

But when our device use starts to affect our mood, replace real-life experiences, or interfere with face-to-face relationships, it’s a sign our habits have crossed the line from healthy to unhealthy.

How are teens more affected?

Teenagers are particularly vulnerable to excessive device use, as the part of the brain responsible for planning, imagining consequences and working for delayed rewards has not yet fully matured. They also have heightened sensitivities to rewards and social evaluation (in other words, what your peers think of you).

Research shows teenagers are more prone to mood swings, are still evolving their ability to manage uncertainty and are learning how to regulate their emotions.

All of this makes them more susceptible to online triggers that can trap a vulnerable teen in a cycle of conflicting and constantly changing emotions, particularly when information is arriving constantly.

For teens (and adults) it can become a complete world of its own where daily responsibilities are avoided and challenges are only faced with a dependency on phones.

So how do you know when it’s become a problem?

What to look out for

There are some obvious signs excessive device use is becoming a problem for teens (or yourself).

1. They use phones to fill in spare time. If every quiet moment is filled with scrolling, checking notifications or opening apps, it shows a teen’s device is the primary way they respond to spare time, stress or discomfort.

2. They appear distracted when you talk to them. If your teen automatically reaches for their phone midway through conversation, it might be a sign they devalue face-to-face exchanges and have lost the discipline to wait.

3. They put off important tasks. When teens routinely avoid everyday responsibilities such as work, homework, school, household chores or tasks that involve mixing with new people.

4. They seem tired all the time. Teens may block negative thoughts by scrolling in bed, socialising online late in the night, or even getting into bed after the school day.

How does it get to this stage?

The devices we rely on have the potential to develop what I call the “addictive pull” due to the features and services available on them. The “pull” begins when notifications, such as likes, messages, loot box wins and emails, arrive on devices unpredictably. Some are positive while others are neutral. And some also relieve worries. This creates a powerful dopamine-driven loop.

Over time, the device itself becomes a conditioned stimulus. This means even something as simple as seeing your phone case, or watching your device’s screen light up, is enough to trigger an urge to check it. It’s almost as if we are magnetically pulled to the device in the hope of a reward (such as more messages or likes), or to soothe a preoccupying worry.

This can also create an anxiety loop which means even without a notification, a person checks their device, rechecks it and experiences brief moments of relief via a message or app. When the loop occurs on repeat, it winds up worry and creates emotional dependence on others or apps.

The “addictive pull” can be hard to resist. Over time these unnoticed habits can become associated with the space where devices are often used (such as the bedroom, the apartment, the bus). The “pull” to re-engage with a device is a result of predictable conditioning and reinforcement processes rather than a lack of willpower. The bedroom – a place of rest, privacy and study – can be particularly problematic for teens and adults.

Leading by example

We cannot expect children or teens to break from the “addictive pull” if the adults around them don’t either.

As a parent, these are some ways you can lead by example to be more intentional when using devices.

1. Recognise the subtle tension that builds when you have a worry and want to reach for your device immediately.

2. When you walk into your home, place your phone or smartwatch out of the way and in a bag.

3. Do not have your phone or tablet in arm’s reach when it is designated family time.

4. Work with each family member to put apps being used without restraint onto one device per person. For instance, a parent or older teen might have TikTok on a tablet and not on their phone (so they can use their phone without distraction). They should then try to use that tablet in only one room of the house, outside of the bedroom.

Remember, an honest picture of everyone’s screen time habits sit on the device’s screen time records. We may get a minor fright when looking at it, but rather than resigning ourselves to this new way of life – and ignoring the insidious impact on attention, mood and wellbeing – we can commit to one another to make small changes.

Danielle Einstein, Adjunct Fellow, School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University

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

I hate you. You’re the worst mum in the world!

It’s a sentence that can feel heartbreaking to parents. You try to set a boundary with your little one and they lash out with “I hate you”.

Those words land can like a punch. Even when you know, deep down, that your child doesn’t really mean it.

Why do kids say this? And how can you respond?

Hitting a nerve

Part of what makes “I hate you” so hard to hear is that it can touch on something most parents quietly worry about. “Am I doing this right?”, “Am I a good parent?”.

Being on the receiving end can also be unexpectedly triggering. For parents who grew up in households where strong emotions were dismissed, minimised, or hidden, a child’s emotional outburst can feel alarming, disrespectful or even shameful. Your instinct might be to shut it down quickly, or to feel something has gone badly wrong.

What’s going on when a child says ‘I hate you’?

Try not to read too much into it if you child says “I hate you”. Young children, especially those under six, are in the early stages of learning how to understand and regulate their emotions. The part of their brain responsible for regulating emotions, is still very much developing.

While this is most common in young children, children of all ages can struggle to find words for overwhelming feelings.

When a young child is overwhelmed by an emotion (like anger at being told no or disappointment of being told to leave the playground), they often don’t have the language to help them express these big feelings.

So they may use the strongest words they know without understanding the true meaning.

The good news is children are most likely to express big, uncomfortable emotions with the people they feel safest with. They trust that this person can handle their feelings, and are confident their love is unconditional. This reflects a strong, secure parent-child relationship.

What can parents do in the moment?

1. Take a breath before you respond

Notice what this brings up for you. Where you can, take a moment to regulate your own emotions so you can model emotion regulation for your child.

2. Acknowledge and validate the emotion

Before anything else, name what you’re seeing. For example, “I can see you’re really angry right now. That makes sense. You really wanted to keep playing, and it’s hard when we have to stop.”

This isn’t about agreeing with the outburst. It’s about letting your child know their feeling has been seen and that anger itself is OK. Strong emotions need acknowledging before they can settle. Teaching children all emotions are OK early on sets them up for strong emotional regulation skills later on.

3. Stay present while the feeling passes

Once you have acknowledged the feeling try to avoid problem-solving straight away. Staying present (keeping your attention on your child — resisting the urge to walk away, pick up your phone, or move straight to problem-solving) and helping your child ride out the big emotion and find a calmer state is the goal.

For some children, they may respond well to a hug or having you sit calmly next to them. Other children may want more space. Staying calm and being present is often enough to help a child regulate their emotions.

4. Gently name the limit

Once there is more calm, gently remind your child that while all emotions are OK, telling someone you hate them can hurt their feelings. For example, “It’s OK to feel angry but it’s not OK to say I hate you. What else could you say next time?”

5. Reconnect

Once your child is calm, find a way to show they are safe and loved. Repairing a situation after conflict is one of the strongest ways to build and sustain a secure attachment – or the bond between parent and child. This is also an important way to model respect, even during times of conflict. You could say, “That was hard. You were really upset. I love you, even when you’re angry.”

6. Help build their emotional literacy

Teaching kids to recognise and name all their emotions can help give them the words to say “I’m angry” next time. Integrating this into play and via books can be useful. Practising strategies that help them respond to strong emotions (for example, jumping up and down, colouring, going outside, petting a pet) when they are calm, can help kids when intense emotions do show up.

7. Remember that support is available

If you find yourself upset about these moments often, or they are bringing up things for you, it’s worth reaching out for support. Talking to someone, whether that’s a friend, a GP, a psychologist or a helpline, can really make a difference and help parents be in a place to better manage when these situations come up.

If this article has raised issues for you, some helplines include:

PANDA — 1300 726 306 (for perinatal mental health, which is also relevant if the parent is also experiencing postnatal difficulties)

Beyond Blue — 1300 22 4636

Mensline- 1300 78 99 78 (a free telephone and online counselling service offering support for Australian men anywhere, anytime)

13YARN — 13 92 76 (for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples)

Alison Fogarty, Research Fellow, Lifespan Institute and School of Psychology, Deakin University, Deakin University; Grace McMahon, Clinical Psychologist and Research Officer in the Intergenerational Health Group, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, and Monique Seymour, Clinical Psychologist, Research Fellow in the School of Psychology, Deakin University

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

If you are feeling financially depleted personally, and pessimistic about the economic outlook generally, figures released this week won’t cheer your mood.

The OECD found Australia was one of 11 developed countries where the real minimum wage had fallen between April 2025 and April 2026.

Meanwhile, Deloitte Access Economics in its latest Business Outlook cut its forecast for growth in 2026–27, with the dismal message, “The economy is now expected to limp along at less than 2.0% annual growth for the next two years”.

This was followed by the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook data projecting Australia’s GDP growth to be 1.9% this year and 1.7% next year.

Australia’s overall economic growth is slow, but at least it’s in positive territory. However, that’s held up by population increase. On a per capita basis, GDP went backwards in two of the past five quarters (March 2025 and March 2026) and was flat in a third (September 2025).

No wonder consumer confidence is low, and One Nation’s tune rings loudly in the ears of voters who hear it reflecting their grievances.

The government would say, hang on a minute, it’s not all bad. Business investment is strong. Unemployment is still very low. It would also point out that “talking down” the economy can play into “pushing down” the economy.

Nevertheless, the government can read the numbers, and one thing they tell us is that without refuelling that vital growth agent, productivity, we will stay in the doldrums.

Despite all the talk since the election about action to boost productivity, we need faster progress to improve our poor performance.

Yes, some reforms are in the pipeline, for example to remove obstacles and streamline approvals in the building sector and to reduce the regulatory burdens on projects.

But those looking for bigger, faster gains are inevitably turning their attention to Artificial Intelligence. At the government level, AI is receiving extensive attention from cabinet and ministers individually.

AI can, potentially, be the accelerant under big productivity gains. New data centres (not all involve AI but increasingly they do) are fuelling business investment. Australia is an attractive home for international investment in these centres because of its land and water, its uptake of technology, and the stability of its legal and political systems.

But AI also brings a mass of potential negatives (or fears of them). Data centres soak up vast amounts of energy and water, as well as producing noise and heat. Some communities are unhappy about them.

This new industrial revolution fires up its bright-eyed advocates, and comes with warnings from the worriers.

It’s a bit like that in the federal ministry too, where there’s a spread of views about the rollout of policies and which stakeholders should have how much say in what’s done.

Some characterise it as a sort of tug-of-war between the enthusiasts and the cautious.

Former industry minister Ed Husic favoured overarching new legislation, but the government has gone down the more decentralised route, with ministers and regulators having carriage of AI in their own areas.

Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton is seen by colleagues as something of an ambassador for AI. Although well down the formal pecking order, Charlton carries weight because he’s highly qualified in economics and tuned into the AI sector. As cabinet secretary he has a level of political access other assistant ministers would not.

Charlton is a strong promoter of AI but also mindful of the need for strict conditions, not least for maintaining its social licence.

Industry minister Tim Ayres – who’s Charlton’s senior minister in the portfolio – is attuned to the opportunities AI presents and doesn’t want Australia to miss out. But he comes from the union movement and has highlighted unions (which are cautious about AI) should be “at the top table” in the rollout.

Employment minister Amanda Rishworth is concerned about the fate of many workers. On Wednesday she released a report prepared by her department on “AI and Employment in Australia”. One line in it neatly sums up where things are. “AI could reshape the labour market, but its effect on employment is highly uncertain.” Bearing in mind we’re in the first stage of this journey, the report found,

There is no evidence to date of broad labour market upheaval driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Australia. Overall labour market conditions remain strong by historical standards, youth outcomes have mostly held up, and occupational reshuffling has not accelerated.

However, occupations more exposed to potential automation by generative AI have grown more slowly than other occupations. Between November 2022 and February 2026, employment in the most-exposed fifth of occupations grew by 5.6%, compared with 9.5% in the least-exposed fifth.

We find a small negative relationship between AI exposure and employment growth. For an occupation with AI exposure one standard deviation above average, our model implies employment was about 2% lower by February 2026 than it would have been under its pre-ChatGPT trend.

The government in December released its National AI Plan. It was interpreted as “light touch” regulation, and reflecting the position of Treasurer Jim Chalmers. It was also light on detail, although it did include an AI Safety Institute and flagged expectations data centres would have to meet, that were subsequently released.

AI can’t have a set-and-forget policy. It has to be constantly updated as things develop, and hot issues must be addressed as they emerge.

Just now, there’s much concern in the music industry and other parts of the arts and creative communities. Arts Minister Tony Burke is dubbed the “shop steward” for the musos. Creatives are particularly worried about their copyright being undermined. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland, who oversees copyright, is said to be disturbed by the agitation. The government believes the existing law on copyright is robust enough, but is ready to act if particular problems need attention.

The government is very aware of the need for Australia to stamp its sovereignty on AI policy. Perhaps influenced by its battle with the tech giants over the enforcement of the under-16 social media ban, it believes it can’t allow “the tech bros to let it rip”, as one source puts it. But it can’t allow the country to fall behind the pack either.

Next week Anthony Albanese will give a speech on AI. It is expected to present a broad picture rather than all the nitty gritty. But it is being billed as showing the level of prime ministerial engagement in this area in which the government is trying to thread a course between huge potential and undoubted risks.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Australians’ life expectancy has increased steadily over time but dropped during the COVID pandemic, according to a new report released today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

The report – Australia’s Health 2026 – shows life expectancy for a boy born in 2022–2024 was 81.1 years, while a girl could expect to live, on average, to 85.1 years.

However newer data not included in the report shows this has stabilised and life expectancy in 2024 was up marginally at 85.5 for women and 81.6 for men.

Between 2003 and 2024, Australians’ life expectancy and years lived in “full health” increased. But the time spent in poor health also rose: by 1.2 years for men and 1.5 years for women.

More than three in five (61%) Australians now have at least one chronic condition – such as asthma, arthritis or depression – and almost two in five (38%) have two or more.

Cancer causes the most burden of disease, or years of healthy life lost to illness and premature death. Mental conditions and substance use disorders as a group are the second biggest cause of healthy life lost.

Dementia is now the leading cause of death in Australia, accounting for almost one in ten deaths in 2024. Dementia deaths rose by 39% in a decade, while deaths from coronary heart disease – the previous leading cause of death – decreased by 18%.

So what are the biggest changes to Australia’s health and wellbeing over the past two years? The Conversation’s panel of health experts explain.

Our experts

Sebastian RosenbergMental health

Sarah DiepstratenCancer

Peter BreadonHealth expenditure

Helen DickinsonCarers

Nicole LeeDrinking

Kathryn BackholerObesity

Mental illness is rising among young people but supports aren’t keeping up

Sebastian RosenbergAssociate Professor, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney

One in five Australians aged 16–85 (22%) had experienced a mental disorder in the previous 12 months. This rate appears fairly stable.

However, the proportion of people aged 16–24 experiencing a mental disorder has increased, from 26% to 39% between 2007 and 2020–2022.

Given 75% of all mental illness manifests before the age of 25, we need effective responses for young Australians.

Mental illness is 15% of the total burden of disease and suicide. Meanwhile, self-inflicted injury was the leading cause of disease burden among males aged 15–44.

Yet a previous report found mental health accounts for only 7% of total health spending. This gap doesn’t explain all of the crisis in mental health, but it explains something.

Some 6.5% of Australians are reported as having psychosocial disability (disability arising from a mental illness). This is up from 4.6% in 2018.

Now half a million Australians with severe or moderate psychosocial support needs aren’t receiving support through the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) or other government‐funded programs.

More cancer in young people but survival rates are increasing overall

Sarah DiepstratenSenior Research Officer, Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Significantly more Australians are surviving five years after a cancer diagnosis, up from 50% in 1987–1991 to 72% in 2017–2021.

This is due to people being diagnosed earlier, when cancers are easier to treat, as well as the availability of more effective therapies.

While survival rates have not improved for all cancers equally, even the deadliest cancers have seen major improvements. Pancreatic cancer only has a 14% five-year survival rate (2017–2021), but this has increased from only 3.1% (1987–1991).

The report highlights increasing cancer incidence among younger people. Diagnoses for people in their 30s have risen by 11.6% since 2000, primarily for colorectal and thyroid cancers.

But the actual numbers remain low (135 cases per 100,000 people), and the number of deaths from cancer among younger people has actually declined by 38% since 2000.

While cancer remains the greatest contributor to disease burden in Australia, addressing modifiable risk factors such as obesity and smoking – coupled with cancer screening and focused research initiatives – will help reduce cancer incidence and deaths going forward.

Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading contributor to disease

Kathryn BackholerCo-Director, Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition, Deakin University

Excess weight and obesity have overtaken tobacco use as the leading risk factor contributing to disease burden.

In 2022–24, around 13.2 million adults (67%) and 1.4 million children and adolescents (27%) were living with obesity or were overweight.

The generational pattern is particularly concerning. Australians born more recently are more likely to be living with obesity compared to previous generations at the same age. Among adults aged 25–34, obesity increased from 20% in 2011–12 to 29% in 2022–24.

Urgent action is needed to create healthier environments that make it easier for Australians to choose healthy foods and stay physically active.

We also need more equitable access to evidence-based treatment and care, including GLP-1 weight-loss medicines. As the report notes, the high cost of these medicines means the people with the greatest need are often less able to access them.

Risky drinking is down, but we still drink more than our OECD peers

Nicole LeeAdjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

Australians drink 9.8 litres of pure alcohol (773 standard drinks) per person each year. This is well above the OECD average of 8.4 litres.

First Nations people are less likely to drink at all than the general population and risky drinking among in First Nations people has fallen from 48% in 2010 to 33% in 2022-23.

Risky drinking, which is often linked to injuries and emergency department visits, has also declined in the general population.

But alcohol is now one of the most preventable drivers of chronic disease. It contributes to more than 200 health conditions such as cancer, heart and liver disease, injuries and poor mental health.

With Australia’s population ageing – and three in five Australians already living with at least one chronic condition – reducing risky drinking is one of our biggest opportunities to prevent future disease and ease pressure on the health system.

Health-care costs have risen, with more people skipping care

Peter BreadonProgram Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute

After pandemic fluctuations, three long-term trends resumed: government spending kept going up, so did the share of funding going to hospitals, and so did patient out-of-pocket fees.

Australia spent just over $10,000 per person on health in 2023–24. That’s 17% higher than a decade ago, on top of inflation, and a quarter higher than the average among wealthy nations.

The biggest area of health spending remains hospitals, which take up a growing share, rising from 39% to 42% over the past decade.

Average out-of-pocket fees totalled $1,634, nearly $200 more than a decade earlier (in today’s dollars). As fees go up, more people are skipping care, with 8% of Australians saying they delayed or avoided a GP visit in 2024–25 because of the cost.

And for some care, patients shoulder a much bigger share of the bill. They pay the most for dental care, covering 61% of total costs, so it’s no surprise 16% of people skipped dental care due to cost.

Carers are compensating for system gaps and are burnt out

Helen DickinsonProfessor, Public Service Research, UNSW Sydney

Unpaid carers provide ongoing support to family members, friends and neighbours who have a disability, chronic illness, mental illness, age-related frailty, dementia, or other condition that limits their independence.

In 2022 around 3 million Australians (one in eight) provided informal care, including 1.2 million primary carers. These carers perform a wide range of tasks that help the person remain safe, healthy and living in the community.

Unpaid carers are estimated to save the Australian economy around $77.9 billion each year in avoided care costs.

Research consistently shows carers experience poorer health and wellbeing than the general population. The AIHW report shows:

• 61% of carers did not report healthy levels of wellbeing, compared with 34% of Australians overall

• 43% felt lonely (often or always) compared with 12% of Australians overall

• 36% experienced high psychological distress, compared to 16% of Australians overall.

The report warns that:

without better-coordinated and more responsive formal support, pressures on unpaid carers may intensify.

Yet the federal government’s proposed NDIS reforms may increase pressures on unpaid carers by tightening eligibility and reducing funded supports.

This risks shifting greater caring responsibilities onto families.

Disclosure statements:

Sarah Diepstraten receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Cure Cancer Australia and My Room Children’s Cancer Charity.

Kathryn Backholer is Vice President (Policy) at the Public Health Association of Australia. She receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council, The Ian Potter Foundation, The National Heart Foundation and VicHealth for her research related to food and nutrition and obesity prevention.

Nicole Lee has previously been awarded grants by state and federal governments, NHMRC and other public funding bodies for alcohol and other drug research. She is CEO of Hello Sunday Morning, a government funded not for profit alcohol early intervention service.

Grattan Institute has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.

Helen Dickinson receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund and Australian governments.

Sebastian Rosenberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Fron Jackson-Webb, Deputy Editor and Senior Health Editor, The Conversation and Matt Garrow, Editorial Web Developer, The Conversation

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

The clock reads 2:13am. You are exhausted. Your eyes ache, your body feels heavy and the alarm is already beginning to loom over the night, yet your brain refuses to let go. Instead, thoughts arrive in waves. Did you send that email? What if you forgot something important? Perhaps now is also the perfect time for your mind to replay a conversation from 2017 with forensic precision.

Many people recognise this frustrating state of being “wired but tired” – the paradoxical feeling of being physically exhausted but mentally unable to switch off. Surely tiredness should produce sleep automatically, but the brain does not simply fall asleep because the body is fatigued. In fact, under stress, exhaustion and sleeplessness often occur together. Part of the reason lies in the biology of survival.

The human stress response evolved to deal with immediate physical threats. For most of human history, danger tended to be extreme and short-lived – a predator nearby, an environmental hazard or conflict with another human group. In those moments, the brain’s priority was not rest but survival.

When the brain detects threat, a region called the amygdala initiates the body’s classic fight-or-flight response. Stress hormones including adrenaline and cortisol are released. Heart rate increases, breathing quickens and attention sharpens. Energy is diverted away from long-term maintenance tasks towards immediate action.

This response is extraordinarily useful – if you are trying to escape a sabre-toothed tiger. It is much less useful when the “threat” is an overflowing inbox or mounting financial pressure.

Modern stressors are psychologically powerful but biologically peculiar. Unlike predators, they rarely resolve quickly. Emails continue arriving. Work follows us home through smartphones and laptops. Social media creates a constant stream of social comparison and low-level vigilance. Even leisure time has become strangely porous, interrupted by notifications, messages and often the expectation of permanent availability.

The result is that the parts of the brain responsible for keeping us alert can remain partially activated for long periods. This matters because sleep is not simply the absence of wakefulness. Falling asleep requires the brain to actively reduce alertness. A network of arousal centres in the brainstem, hypothalamus and forebrain normally keeps us awake and attentive during the day. To transition into sleep, these systems must quieten down.

Under long-term stress, however, the brain can become stuck in a state of hyperarousal. Even when the body is exhausted, the brain continues scanning, anticipating and rehearsing. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a certain kind of sense. If the environment feels threatening or uncertain, being fully offline may not seem safe.

One reason this state feels so unpleasant is that physical exhaustion and mental arousal are controlled by overlapping but partly separate systems. Your muscles may desperately need rest while your brain continues producing stress-driven alertness. The result is the strange mismatch many people know well, a tired body and racing thoughts.

Cortisol also plays an important role. Under normal circumstances, cortisol follows a daily rhythm. Levels rise in the morning to promote wakefulness and gradually decline towards night. Chronic stress can disrupt this pattern, leaving the body activated later into the evening.

Some studies suggest that people with insomnia show elevated metabolic and neurological activity even while trying to sleep – almost as though the brain is idling too high. Modern life may amplify this problem in ways our nervous systems did not evolve to handle.

Why the modern world makes it worse

Artificial light suppresses melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate sleep timing. Smartphones provide endless cognitive stimulation at exactly the point the brain should be winding down. Doomscrolling combines emotional arousal, uncertainty and novelty – three things human attention systems find almost impossible to ignore.

Then there is rumination: the repetitive mental replaying of worries and problems. Humans possess a remarkable ability to mentally simulate the future and revisit the past. This capacity helps us plan, learn and avoid danger. But it also means the brain can continue generating stress responses long after any immediate threat has disappeared.

The cruel irony is that the more exhausted we become, the harder emotional regulation often gets. Sleep deprivation itself increases amygdala reactivity while reducing the moderating influence of the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain involved in rational control and perspective.

A tired brain becomes more emotionally reactive, which can make worries feel even louder at night. In other words, being overtired can make the brain less capable of calming itself down.

This helps explain why “just relax” is usually terrible advice for insomniacs. Hyperarousal is not simply a failure of willpower. It is a deeply biological state shaped by stress systems, hormones, attention networks and learned patterns of vigilance. That does not mean the situation is hopeless.

Sleep researchers often emphasise that rest and safety are closely linked in the brain. Consistent routines, reduced evening stimulation, exercise, daylight exposure and limiting late-night screen use can all help reinforce the signals that night is a time for recovery rather than alertness. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia has also proved remarkably effective, partly because it targets the cycle of anxiety and sleeplessness itself.

Perhaps the most important point is broader. Feeling “wired but tired” is not evidence that your body has failed to rest properly. Often it is evidence that the brain has become too good at staying alert in a digital world that never really stops.

Michelle Spear, Professor of Anatomy, University of Bristol

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

Around one in three people worldwide have been infected with a microscopic parasite called Toxoplasma gondii – or simply “toxo” – which can cause toxoplasmosis. After the initial infection, toxo settles into our muscles and brain, where it can remain for life.

A parasite that lives in our brain for life – that sounds worrying.

Yet, the vast majority would not even know they are infected, as it rarely poses clinical problems in healthy people who aren’t pregnant. In fact, our bodies do a remarkable job of protecting us against a barrage of infections, without us even knowing, toxo included.

So, why has toxo received so much attention? And are you at risk even if you don’t have a cat?

Do we get toxo from cats?

Cats can carry toxo and pass it on to humans through their faeces. They are the only “definitive hosts” in which the toxo parasite can reproduce.

But this doesn’t mean it’s only cat owners who are at risk.

Worldwide, eating undercooked meat that contains toxo is a major source of infection.

It’s also important to note that cats only shed toxo when they are infected for the first time and are then immune afterwards, meaning they no longer shed and pass it on. Most infected cats show no symptoms, but if they develop the clinical disease toxoplasmosis, they may lose their appetite and experience fever and lethargy.

Who is at risk?

Many people first hear about the risk of toxo infection in relation to pregnancy.

Expectant mothers are told to stay away from undercooked meat and kitty litter – two ways we can accidentally ingest toxo. The parasite can cross the placenta and infect the developing fetus, leading to blindness, congenital neurological defects and miscarriage.

Thankfully, this is very rare in Australia, estimated to be 0.17–2.3 cases per 10,000 births. The risk is considered low enough that routine screening during pregnancy is not necessary.

Some people will have previously been infected with toxo and won’t be at risk of a new infection during pregnancy. The risk is to pregnant women who have never had toxo.

In Australia, infectious disease doctors and oncologists are also trained to look for toxo.

A dormant infection can become a deadly illness if it reactivates into an acute infection which can occur if you become severely immunosuppressed, after receiving a bone marrow transplant or contracting HIV. In these rare cases, effective therapies are available, although with some significant possible side effects.

Toxo can also cause progressive blindness if parasites lodge in the retina. Retinal toxoplasmosis has been estimated to be one in 149 people in Australia. Optometrists and ophthalmologists are well trained to look for this and other eye infections.

The risk is much higher in other countries

For instance, the estimated infection rate in France is around 50%, while in Brazil up to 80% of people have been exposed. These countries report a far higher number of related health problems.

Such high infection levels are thought to do with eating undercooked meat, greater numbers of stray cats, the type of locally circulating strains, and local hotter and humid climates that allows toxo to survive in the environment.

OK, but how does toxo affect the brain?

Once infected, toxo can live in the host’s muscles or brain for life. But we have no way of knowing exactly where it is; the only tests we have show the presence of antibodies, not the parasite itself.

Interestingly, when a rodent’s brain is infected, toxo can manipulate the rodent’s behaviour, including reversing its natural aversion to cat odour.

Scientists have speculated that the parasite does this to make the infected rodent less likely to run away, and therefore more likely to be eaten by a cat. This completes the parasite’s complicated life cycle; their sexual cycle exclusively takes place inside cats.

Such a remarkable ability of toxo – a single-celled organism – to impart behavioural changes on a complex organ like the brain seems fantastical. But it has been proven true over multiple rodent laboratory studies.

But while we know toxo can affect rodents’ brain and behaviour, we don’t know how this happens, exactly why, or whether it happens outside of the laboratory.

Can toxo affect human behaviour?

In humans, researchers have found links between toxo and a wide range of brain disorders and behaviours, including risk-taking behaviour and psychiatric conditions, especially schizophrenia.

But we should view these findings very cautiously, as these are correlative studies. This means they do not prove toxo is the cause of these diseases or behaviours, just that there is a link. Further, they show only a mild increase in risk. Other published scientific papers refute some of the findings.

Correlative studies also cannot prove which came first: whether a condition such as schizophrenia, for example, changes your behaviour in ways that make a toxo infection more likely, or whether a toxo infection predisposes you to – or even causes – this condition.

This is the most contentious area of research in the field, so is continues to be a major focus for scientists.

How worried should I be?

So should the fact that one in three people carry a brain-dwelling parasite keep us awake at night?

Probably not.

For most healthy people, toxo remains a silent passenger for life, causing no illness at all. Our health-care system already manages the situations where it poses genuine risks, particularly during pregnancy and in people with weakened immune systems.

But understanding how this remarkably successful parasite hides from our immune system could lead to something we’ve never had before: treatments that completely clear dormant infection.

That would make a real difference for the people most at risk and would transform how we think about one of the world’s most common infections.

Chris Tonkin, Associate Professor, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)

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

The average Australian visits a community pharmacy 18 times a year – more than any other health service.

Pharmacies will only get more important as Australia’s population gets older and sicker, and more scripts are dispensed.

But policy failures are holding the sector back. Vested interests control decision-making. Prices and services aren’t based on evidence. And regulations block competition, innovation and discounting.

A new Grattan Institute report shows how to set the pharmacy sector up for the future.

Secret backroom deals

Australian pharmacy policy is a case study in bad governance.

Pharmacies are funded and regulated through Community Pharmacy Agreements negotiated between the federal government and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia.

The Guild represents most Australian pharmacy owners. It’s also one of the most powerful political lobby groups in the country. In the past five years, it has donated A$2.5 million to political parties, making it the largest donor from the health-care sector.

No other Australian health industry group gets to negotiate its own funding behind closed doors, with no public evidence to justify the decisions. These opaque negotiations should be replaced with independent, transparent, policy decisions that are based on evidence.

It looks like we’re paying too much

When a pharmacy dispenses a Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) medicine, it gets fees to cover labour, administration and handling. The patient pays up to the maximum co-payment, and the government pays the rest.

Like so much in pharmacy policy, the dispensing fees are set through negotiation with the guild, with no public data to justify the numbers. As result, we can’t know if the price is right – but there are signs it’s too high.

Funding for each script has increased even as e-prescriptions and automation have slashed the labour involved in dispensing. The guild’s own data suggest member profits have more than doubled in real terms over the past decade.

The fix is clear. Government funding shouldn’t be negotiated at all. Like for public hospitals and aged care, it should be determined by the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, based on real cost data.

For patients, discounts on PBS medicines are restricted by complex rules. Those rules depend on how much a medicine costs in total, counting funding from both patients and the government.

For the cheapest medicines, discounting is allowed. For the most expensive, it’s banned outright. For those in the middle, pharmacies can offer discounts, but only if they give up all their government funding for that script.

In 2015, an optional $1 discount on the maximum patient out-of-pocket was introduced, but it’s being phased out. It should be reinstated and increased over time.

Some claim it’s unfair if some patients get a discount when others don’t. People in areas with little competition between pharmacies are more likely to miss out. But these aren’t surcharges – total fees are capped – and discounts in one pharmacy don’t come at the expense of patients in another.

Even if dispensing should be restricted, the rules we have, which block discounting for some medicines and not others, make little sense.

Services need to be good value

Proposals to expand the services that pharmacies can offer – to include things such as prescribing medicines and chronic disease management – have generated heated debate.

The guild and pharmacist workforce groups say more pharmacy services is a commonsense solution to growing demand for primary health care. But medical bodies warn it would fragment care and risk patient safety.

The evidence shows it’s not so black and white.

International studies show pharmacists can safely provide a range of services, including prescribing, and that these services are popular with patients.

But with rapidly growing health-care demand and spending, services must also offer good value for money. Here the evidence is much weaker. That’s because pharmacies pose unique risks to value.

Walk-in appointments mean some conditions are treated that would have resolved on their own. There is a risk of duplicating GP care. And a retail setting creates commercial incentives to promote unnecessary care.

Only one new service has enough cost-effectiveness evidence for a national roll-out: prescribing for uncomplicated urinary tract infections.

International evidence for some other services is promising. But dozens of government-funded trials have failed to show their cost-effectiveness here.

The federal government should coordinate stronger national trials that focus on the most promising services, such as treating shingles and prescribing contraception.

Get pharmacists to work alongside GPs

It’s time to scale up a new type of “integrated pharmacist”. Instead of dispensing, they work in general practice alongside GPs to provide medicine reviews and patient education.

The United Kingdom and Canada already fund these positions at scale. Australia should too, with government funding for pharmacists in general practice and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations.

Unleash competition

Pharmacies are private businesses that receive billions of dollars in government funding. In return, they should face competition that promotes improved efficiency, quality and convenience – like other businesses.

But location rules dictate how close a new pharmacy can open to an existing one, and how far an existing one can move.

Several European countries lifted similar restrictions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The result was more pharmacies, longer opening hours, and, in several cases, lower prices.

Ownership rules ban anyone but pharmacists from owning a pharmacy. This is supposedly to ensure pharmacies prioritise patient care. But we don’t apply this rule anywhere else. Standards of care are upheld by clinician training, registration and accountability, regardless of who owns the business. Pharmacists already carry those obligations.

Together, location and ownership rules protect a small group of incumbents from having to compete on prices or quality.

The government should scrap these rules, and ask the competition watchdog to design competition safeguards, alongside independent reporting on quality and outcomes.

Future pharmacy

The current Community Pharmacy Agreement expires in mid 2029. Three years is enough time to collect cost data, start trials, legislate competition reforms, and set up quality monitoring.

If the federal government acts now, the current agreement – the eighth – should be the last.

Peter Breadon, Program Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute; Mia Jessurun, Associate, Disability Program, Grattan Institute, and Molly Chapman, Associate, Health Program, Grattan Institute

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

More children under five years old should be able to be vaccinated in pharmacies from January 2027 under a range of measures designed to boost vaccine coverage announced in this year’s federal budget.

Other measures include funding to send families SMS reminders and targeted information when their child’s vaccines are due.

These measures aim to stem a decline in childhood vaccine coverage we’ve seen since 2020.

What’s the issue?

Vaccine coverage in Australian children has been steadily declining since 2020. The latest data show a drop in fully vaccinated 12-month-olds from 94.8% in 2020 to 90.5% in 2025.

On-time vaccination (getting a routine vaccine within 30 days of the recommended age) has dropped even further compared with levels before the COVID pandemic.

In 2025, nearly two in five children received the first dose of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine (recommended at 12 months old) late. One in five children received their second dose of a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP)-containing vaccine late.

Two out of ten adolescents had not received a human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine dose by 15 years of age. Three out of ten had not received an adolescent dose of meningococcal ACWY vaccine by 17 years of age.

Return of ‘old foes’

The declines in coverage are occurring at a time when we have seen a global rise in vaccine preventable diseases.

Measles cases have risen globally and led to the loss of measles elimination status in many countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada. In Australia, there have already been more than 100 measles cases this year.

We’re battling Australia’s worst diphtheria outbreak in decades with more than 425 cases in 2026 (mostly in the Northern Territory and Western Australia). This is a scenario that could be curbed by vaccines.

This, coupled with the detection of polio in sewage in Western Australia, is a timely reminder to make sure you and your children are up to date with your routine vaccines.

Why the decline?

There are many reasons why vaccination coverage is falling, including:

• a decline in trust of health-care providers
• concerns about safety and efficacy of vaccines
• proliferation of online health-related misinformation
• practical barriers (such as out-of-pocket costs, convenience and access to vaccine providers)
• a shortage of doctors, nurses and Aboriginal health workers, especially in rural areas, making it harder to get appointments or access walk-in clinics.

A 2025 national survey asked parents of children under five about barriers to vaccination. More than half of parents of partially vaccinated children said vaccines were unsafe and did not trust information about vaccines from healthcare providers.

A survey of Australian parents looked at the impact of the COVID pandemic on trust and confidence in routine vaccinations. It found that between 2017 and 2023 there was an increase in the proportions of parents expressing ideas about childhood vaccinations that have been shown to be incorrect. These included that vaccine ingredients were unsafe, vaccines cause autism and children received too many vaccines.

Are there safety concerns?

The vaccines recommended and used in the childhood national immunisation program a decade ago are essentially the same ones used today.

Australia has about 300,000 births recorded annually, with an estimated coverage of 90% for infant vaccines. This means about 2.5 million infants have received vaccines over the past decade since 2015.

Australia also has a comprehensive system to detect serious safety signals. If there were any serious issues related to national immunisation program vaccines over this time, we’d have spotted them by now – we haven’t.

How will the new measures help?

Family life is busy so being able to get your kids vaccinated at pharmacies free of charge will hopefully make it easier to stay on top of vaccinations and get vaccinated on time.

This year, the new nasal flu vaccine, registered for children aged two to under 18 years, is available in some pharmacies. However, access and eligible ages for free flu vaccine vary by jurisdiction.

Currently, children aged five and older can already receive childhood vaccines in pharmacies under the National Immunisation Program Vaccination in Pharmacies program.

From January 1 2027, children under five years should also be able to get their childhood vaccines in pharmacies in the new expanded program. A health department spokesperson confirmed to The Conversation that at this stage, participating pharmacies would start doing so from next year, where state and territory legislation permitted it.

These timely initiatives target barriers to accessing vaccination. So they are an important step to stop further declines in coverage and restore community protection against further resurgence of vaccine preventable disease.

Nicholas Wood, Professor, The Children's Hospital at Westmead Clinical School and Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute, University of Sydney and Lucy Deng, Paediatrician and Clinical Senior Lecturer, Children's Hospital Westmead Clinical School, University of Sydney

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

Earlier today, the ABC flagged a shift in their position on generative artificial intelligence (AI) use in their news production. Despite previous caution, a recent deal with US tech company Anthropic has opened the door for ABC staff to bring Claude AI into their broadcasting news work.

For now, the scope of this inclusion is limited to about 100 employees. However, the ABC has signalled a willingness to expand this scope to include other tasks. The broadcaster will also hire specialists to help with AI adoption.

The broadcaster is also piloting conversion of regional radio bulletins into articles with its own AI tool developed by the ABC.

The goal is to free up time for staff to engage in other core journalistic work, such as investigations, while also expanding the ABC’s production capabilities.

Australians have a distinctive distrust of AI tools, so it remains to be seen how the public will react to this change. On the other hand, the decision tracks with a long history of editors and journalists being early adopters of tech innovations.

Journalists already use various data tools. And it’s possible to use generative AI to augment journalistic work in valuable and unprecedented ways.

However, this comes at a time when journalism faces crises of sustainability for journalists and news – problems AI can as easily exacerbate as remedy.

The original tech-heads?

Journalists and news producers have long had not only a vested interest in innovations that might improve their busy workflows, but also a broad curiosity about the cutting edge of tools and technologies.

Generative AI in chatbot form has only made headlines in the past three years. But journalists have saved time by using automated systems and “robo-writing” to convert data into simple news stories for over a decade. In one 2016 study, readers even rated computer-written articles as “more credible and higher in journalistic expertise”.

Nevertheless, with rampant tech adoption also come concerns that some innovations are more disruptive than beneficial.

For example, social media and analytics introduced the almighty algorithm as an unwelcome additional editor to journalists’ work, undermining their autonomy.

Generative AI introduces a new threat that raises existential concerns for the sustainability of news.

Disrupting and displacing journalism

Journalists are more worried about generative AI than they were with other automated tools in the past – because chatbots can seemingly write just like a human can. In response, they’ve been emphasising their indispensable role as gatekeepers who convey news to the public.

So if organisations choose to use AI to help produce journalism, a key question is how to handle ethics and concerns over quality. Time-poor professionals in fields from law to medicine have found themselves burned when their generative AI went off-script and crafted plausible fictions.

This potentially raises a bigger threat for journalists. The profession is already facing a crisis of public mistrust, including in Australia. Relying on AI for content generation opens the door to missteps that news producers like the ABC can ill afford.

But these risks can be mitigated if newsrooms dedicate additional effort to verifying and curating the AI content. This makes journalists’ roles as gatekeepers more important than ever. Yet it also relies on audiences having a relationship with journalists and appreciating their judgement and analysis in the first place.

These efforts represent a new kind of work, one that shifts the lens away from the forms of production that have long been central to journalism.

A space of opportunities

Conversely, the latest AI tools do offer journalists new ways to augment their work. The large language models and other AI tools the public uses to generate office emails or funny cat pictures have been used by journalists globally to engage in unprecedented investigations and news production.

BBC’s in-depth coverage of Russia’s presence in Ukraine leveraged AI to dig through troves of text and video. This provided insights that would have been impractical or impossible to achieve through manual methods.

Global South news producers have used AI to overcome endemic resourcing challenges. They’ve been able to repurpose and translate content, extending the capacities of already stretched news reporters.

Generative AI can save time. Using AI tools for routine news production can make room for journalists to improve their relationships with audiences, focus on quality, and make a stronger case for journalism’s distinctive value.

Displacing journalists or displacing journalism?

These changes at the ABC are coming at a time when funding and resources for journalism are becoming increasingly scarce. The business models that have long underpinned our media system were rendered unsustainable by big tech, while Australian news organisations are having to compete with overabundant online media from across the world.

AI tools bring potential for further displacement. AI summaries served by search engines summarise news content instead of directing online traffic to the original news source.

Additionally, AI-generated news obscures Australian media outlets or redirects users to larger international news organisations – particularly those in the US. Newsrooms are weighing their options on how to best use AI even as they strategise how to compete with it as a source for news.

The ABC’s goals for using AI in their news work fits a long-established historical trend toward keeping journalism on the cutting edge of what technological innovations can offer.

The efficiency gains and expanded capabilities for journalism are real, and audiences can appreciate its outputs even as they distrust the technology itself.

The question remains whether the ABC can channel AI into benefits for the public in a way that does not sacrifice their commitment to news quality or the public’s esteem for the public broadcaster.

Correction: this article was updated to clarify that Claude AI is not being used for converting radio bulletins to text, but instead the ABC uses its own AI tool for this pilot.

Timothy Koskie, Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

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

Seventy years ago, Earth had only one satellite: the Moon. Now it has more than 15,000 – about 10,000 of which are owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The world’s first trillionaire plans to launch one million more satellites, each roughly 70 metres long and 20 metres wide, that would form a data centre megaconstellation.

But more satellites means more space junk, which is already threatening critical infrastructure we rely on every day.

Addressing this problem effectively requires work across three fronts: technology, policy and philosophy.

The race to the Moon and beyond is accelerating. Some say it’s for the benefit of all humanity. But is it really? In this seven-part series, we explore what our future in space will look like, how we might travel and survive out there, and what’s needed to stop a catastrophe from happening.

13 million cane toads worth of space junk

Space junk is everything in Earth orbit that doesn’t have a purpose. It includes discarded rocket bodies, defunct and broken satellites, and fragments down to nanoparticle size. There are 36,000 pieces of junk larger than ten centimetres and tens of millions of smaller pieces and particles.

The estimated weight of all of this junk is 13,486 tonnes, the equivalent of 13 million adult cane toads. The United States, Russia (as well as the former USSR), and China are the biggest contributors.

Space junk is dangerous because it’s orbiting at almost unimaginable speeds – 7 kilometres per second on average in low Earth orbit. A collision can break up a satellite and create even more space junk.

The worst case scenario is called Kessler syndrome. Each collision creates space junk which collides with other space junk, in an endless cascade. It could make regions of Earth orbit unusable, or possibly even cut Earth off from space.

Human spaceflight is already threatened by the debris around Earth. The International Space Station manoeuvres to avoid collision at least once a year.

The default solution is to let space junk get dragged into the atmosphere where it incinerates. For example, at least one Starlink satellite burns up in the atmosphere every day.

But this is now creating enough soot and alumina particles to have an impact on the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

New technology can help

Technological solutions involve active debris removal, and strategic satellite and mission design.

Active debris removal gets rid of old spacecraft by tipping them into the atmosphere or pushing them into a “graveyard” orbit" which isn’t used by functioning satellites. There’s even a hit list of the 50 most dangerous spacecraft – mainly abandoned rocket bodies.

Debris removal technologies include nets, magnets, tethers, sails, slingshots, and harpoons. Very few have been successfully tested in space.

New satellites can be made from materials that are more durable, so they last longer – or more disposable, so they can be used and quickly de-orbited.

Japan has been testing wood as a spacecraft material. Other options include refuelling spacecraft to extend their life.

Better policies

Policies are also changing to focus more on satellite end-of-life disposal.

The old standard was that spacecraft should not remain in original mission orbits for more than 25 years. Now it’s five years. The disadvantage to this policy is that more spacecraft will burn up in the atmosphere.

The European Space Agency is spearheading a zero debris policy, and the Inter-Agency Debris Co-ordination Committee issues debris mitigation guidelines. There’s also an international standard for space debris mitigation.

Better international co-operation could be achieved through space traffic management. Space traffic management aims to establish “road rules” for avoiding congestion in orbit, by limiting debris creation, co-ordinating orbital activities and sharing information. However, a globally agreed space traffic management system doesn’t yet exist.

All the same, satellite operators are starting to take their environmental responsibilities seriously. But is this enough?

Rethinking space

Old ways of thinking about space have not served humanity well.

The ideologies driving the space junk problem are competition for prestige and orbital resources, and the belief that there are no moral obligations to the space environment. Often, orbital space is not seen as an environment at all because it is without life.

These beliefs coincide in the “techbro” space, in which billionaires are competing to launch satellite megaconstellations. Research has shown caring for the environment is not seen as masculine.

Earth and space are no longer separate domains. Space junk should be managed as a more-than-planetary interconnected system extending from the spacecraft cemetery at the bottom of the ocean, through the atmosphere, to all Earth and lunar orbits. The Moon’s surface is also being impacted by space junk.

Philosopher Val Plumwood’s co-participation approach to environmental management provides a new perspective. We give the environment what it needs to flourish, instead of depleting it to the point of collapse.

The jury is still out on whether Kessler Syndrome will eventually cut us off from space. Perhaps new myths and stories will arise around the space junk people see burning through the atmosphere. Watching the skies for “cultural meteorites” is becoming part of the shared human experience.

Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

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

The Artemis II mission to the Moon has reignited humanity’s desire for exploration and renewed our perspective of Earth. It has also revived our fascination with space food.

As space missions become longer and more ambitious, food in space has emerged as a crucial priority, intrinsically linked to brain health, culture, sustainability and agriculture.

These challenges are driving innovation, inspiring practical solutions for life both on Earth and beyond.

The race to the Moon and beyond is accelerating. Some say it’s for the benefit of all humanity. But is it really? In this seven-part series, we explore what our future in space will look like, how we might travel and survive out there, and what’s needed to stop a catastrophe from happening.

Once an engineering problem

In the early days of human space travel, eating was treated largely as an engineering problem rather than an aesthetic one. Astronauts survived on pureed meals squeezed from aluminium tubes, and on freeze-dried cubes.

In 1973, Skylab, the United States’ first experimental space station in low Earth orbit, introduced the first truly functional space galley allowing for the preparation and cooking of meals.

Since then nutrition and food have remained secondary concerns, often reduced to issues of mass and storage efficiency.

Perhaps the most famous early space food controversy occurred during the Gemini 3 mission in 1965, when astronaut John Young secretly smuggled a corned beef sandwich into orbit, only for crumbs to float through the capsule in what became known as a cautionary tale. The crumbs from the sandwich could have resulted in catastrophic errors, if they had jammed or impacted any of the onboard equipment.

Today researchers are no longer asking whether astronauts can eat in space, but instead: how does the space environment alter how food tastes? How can nutrition optimise astronaut performance and cognitive function? How can food growth systems support sustainability during long-distance space exploration missions?

And perhaps most importantly, what does human food culture look like beyond Earth? Because even in space, life is about more than survival – there must still be room for small luxuries.

Spoilt for pre-packaged choice

Astronauts are currently spoilt for choice when it comes to pre-packaged foods aboard the International Space Station, with the current menu offering a selection of more than 200 meal and beverage options. The catch though, is that aboard their missions, they are only allowed 8-10 of those different choices. This means that during months-long missions, food fatigue can kick in.

But one thing is still missing – daily fresh produce.

The astronauts are treated to a few pieces of fresh fruit each resupply mission every few months. But this certainly doesn’t compare to the fresh food us humans on Earth have access to.

Ready-to-eat fresh food in space has become a common theme of our research in recent years.

We’ve been exploring the viability of yoghurt production, mushroom growth and even various microgreens on board the International Space Station. Microgreens are the young, tender seedlings of edible vegetables or herbs.

This research explores everything from the basics of nutritional properties of the food, to how the biological systems may have changed in orbit.

In a microgravity environment, producing foods as basic as yoghurt, mushrooms and microgreens becomes exponentially more complicated. Limited resources, stresses on the biological systems, and constrained space are all major considerations.

But these are challenges we must overcome, especially as we think of the future of space exploration where we will no longer be able to rely entirely on prepackaged meals.

More than nutrition

There are serious concerns for humans’ gut health over long space flights. Increasing fresh, space-cultivated foods might help to address this.

Above nutrition, food is vital to human culture. Shared meals and the art of preparing even the most basic meals play deeply into the mental health of humans, and this is especially true aboard a space station.

Even kids recognise the importance of food as a cultural tool. When British astronaut Tim Peake challenged students to create a meal for him on the International Space Station, many thought about the meaning different foods had in their own lives and what they didn’t want astronauts to miss out on.

This human connection is vital. It helps us appreciate how space on a fundamental level is a human endeavour.

As we look beyond low-Earth orbit and set our sights on a Moon base in the 2030s, we must consider both nutrition and the overall experience of living and eating for the astronauts on lunar missions that will last weeks or even months.

Through the Artemis II mission we saw first-hand the simple joys that came from shared meals. For example, the crew celebrated their far side of the Moon crossing with Canadian maple cream cookies. We even saw a tub of Nutella floating through the capsule.

Food cannot just be functional; it needs to serve multiple purposes. Sometimes, it should simply bring joy.

The future of space is uncertain, but one thing we can count on is that food is one of the vital parts of our continued exploration.

Sara Webb, Associate Dean of Innovation and Engagement, Swinburne University of Technology; Jac Cotttee, PhD Student, School of Science, Computing and Emerging Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, and Rebecca Allen, Co-Director Space Technology and Industry Institute, Swinburne University of Technology

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