“It is the law of human life and of human nature that a new generation is ever coming forth,” said the Roman statesman Cicero (106–43 BCE).

His view was echoed by the poet Simonides of Ceos (6th to 5th century BCE): “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men.”

The metaphor was a simple one. One day we are full of life, green and fresh, but soon we start to wither and die. Fresh leaves take our place, but they too will fall, only to be replaced by new leaves in their turn.

In the ancient world, there were many different views about the relationship between younger and older generations. Greek and Roman texts reveal that, just like today, generational conflict was rife.

At the same time, however, ancient texts also suggest ways the young and old can profitably get along – a message that is perhaps needed for our times.

Causes of generational conflict

In ancient times, there were many causes of generational conflict. One was that the old sensed things were changing in ways contrary to their hopes and wishes.

The Roman comic playwright Caecilius (219–168 BCE) described the feelings of an old man watching and reflecting on the new generations coming up. In a play (whose title is unknown), the old man is exasperated and frustrated, and decides to complain:

Old Age, if you bring no other defects with you, when you come, this one’s enough: by living long a man sees much he doesn’t want to.

Another source of conflict was that the young felt society had been ruined by the previous generation. For this reason, the young had little hope of making a way within that society for themselves. The Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE), for example, criticised his parents’ generation with these harsh words:

Our fathers’ age, worse than our grandfathers’, gave birth to us, an inferior breed, who will in due course produce still more degenerate offspring.

Different character types?

The most extensive ancient attempt to explain the causes of generational conflict is supplied by Aristotle (384–322 BCE). According to Aristotle, conflicts between young and old can partly be attributed to the different characters people have when they are young and old.

The young, Aristotle tells us, are lustful, changeable in their desires, passionate, hot-tempered, impulsive, ambitious, simple-natured, hot-blooded and inexperienced. “All their errors are due to excess and vehemence,” he argued:

they think they know everything, and confidently affirm it, and this is the cause of their excess in everything. If they do wrong it is due to insolence not wickedness.

The young, said Aristotle, are “fond of laughter, and therefore witty; for wit is cultured insolence”.

The old, on the other hand, are positive about nothing. They are, according to Aristotle, lacking in energy, hesitant about everything, maliciously negative-minded, selfish and excessively suspicious. “They are not generous,” he claimed, “for property is one of these necessaries, and at the same time, they know from experience how hard it is to get and how easy to lose”.

Moreover, they are “cowardly and inclined to anticipate evil”. Old people

live in memory rather than in hope; for the life that remains to them is short, but what is past is long, and hope belongs to the future, memory to the past […] they are incessantly talking of the past, because they take pleasure in recollection.

Aristotle thinks this conflict of character is at least partially responsible for some generational conflict within society. But balance is afforded by the middle-aged, whose characters “preserve the due mean” between the young and the old. To be middle-aged is to combine “all the advantages that youth and old age possess separately”; excesses and defects are replaced with “due moderation and fitness”.

What do the young owe the old?

In ancient Greek and Roman society, the traditional expectation was reverence toward one’s parents and elders. As early as the 6th century BCE in Greece, care for elder relatives was enshrined in law. Mistreatment of parents, which included failure to feed and house one’s mother and father, had strict penalties and often resulted in jail time.

Among the Romans, fathers had complete legal control over their sons and daughters, through the power of patria potestas. This included the right to inflict capital punishment on children. This power only ceased on the father’s death or when a daughter was married.

A prominent source of generational conflict was the feeling, among older generations, that young people no longer showed older people any respect. This point is brought up by the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes (450–380 BCE). In his play Clouds, one of the characters gives a list of things young people do that irritate older people, including failing to offer their seats to elders and behaving rudely towards their parents.

What do the old owe the young?

For the ancient Greeks and Romans, one of the expectations people had about older members of the population, who controlled the majority of the wealth and had the most political influence, is that they would maintain social stability by making sensible political decisions and enacting sensible laws.

Generational conflict increased in times when older generations failed to manage political affairs well. During the turmoil of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta, which ended in Athens’ disastrous defeat, the younger generations of Athenians became increasingly disobedient towards the older generations. This was largely because of a sense that political affairs had been mismanaged.

The Greek philosopher Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (late 5th century BCE), gave an oration in which he criticised older generations for their failures of governance, implying this was the main reason why young people were starting to dissent. At a time when “we must obey others as rulers but must suffer the consequences ourselves”, he argued, it becomes necessary for the young to speak up.

Mitigating generational conflict is not an easy thing to do, but the Greeks and Romans did have a suggestion about how to achieve some kind of generational harmony. Their advice was to focus on reason and rational debate.

People should use reason to determine collectively what is good and best for all, and people of all generations should be encouraged to put reason and the common good above their personal interests.

As the Greek orator Isocrates (436–338 BCE) said in his oration Archidamus, older people do not always know what is best and younger people are not always wrong.

Thus decisions needed to be based on shared deliberation and the use of reason, as “it is not by the number of our years that we differ in wisdom from one another, but by our natural endowments and by our cultivation of them”.

Idealistic words, but ones worth remembering in our own time of fractured generational relations. After all, the young will eventually become the old, at which point they too will complain that the world is going downhill, that nobody listens anymore, and that the next generation has forgotten the basic rules of civilisation – such as giving up one’s seat, not talking back, and not spending so much time on whatever alarming new technology replaces TikTok.

Clearly, the ancient evidence does not offer a simple solution to generational conflict.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

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

When basketball was invented by medical doctor James Naismith in 1891 – to keep American football players active during winter – all baskets were worth two points, regardless of where they were shot from.

Games were dominated by tall players who usually shot from close to the basket.

It was often very crowded near the basket and there were fewer opportunities for smaller players.

This all changed when the 3-point line was introduced.

History of the 3-point line

The 3-point line was temporarily trialled in a few college games and minor professional leagues from the 1940s to the early 1960s, but was seen as more of a gimmick.

It gained more popularity after it was introduced in the American Basketball Association (ABA) (a competitor league to the NBA) during the 1967–68 season.

Sports can change dramatically in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, these moments create immediate shockwaves. Other times, it’s not until much later that their impact become obvious. This is part of a rolling series that explores key (and sometimes long forgotten) moments in sports history.

The ABA wanted to make basketball more interesting and exciting. It viewed the 3-pointer as the equivalent to a home run in baseball and believed it would “give smaller player a chance to score and open up the defence to make the game more enjoyable to fans”.

The ABA merged with the NBA in 1976 but the NBA did not immediately introduce the 3-pointer because many traditional coaches and players were against it.

It was finally introduced for the 1979–80 season, with Chris Ford from the Boston Celtics shooting the first one.

The International Basketball Association (1984) and other national leagues followed this move during the next decade.

It changed basketball, slowly

The 3-point line did not make a big difference straight away.

Players still preferred to shoot from closer to the basket because there was a higher chance of success. Teams did not practise 3-pointers and generally only used them when trying to win a game in the final few seconds.

The San Diego Clippers scored the most 3-pointers for the 1979–80 season, with 177 (2.2 per game). Brian Taylor from the Clippers had the most individual 3-pointers (90).

Times have changed.

During the 2024–25 season the Celtics scored the most 3-pointers: 1,475 (17.8 per game) and every team in the NBA scored more than 900. Some 139 players made 100 or more.

How 3-pointers became more popular

A few key events contributed to 3-pointers becoming more popular.

The inclusion of a 3-point contest at the NBA All-Star weekend in 1986 made the shot more respected. It helped that the first three were won by popular Celtics All-Star Larry Bird.

From 1994 to 1997 the NBA moved the 3-point line closer to the basket (from 7.24 metres to 6.71m) to encourage more scoring in games.

While it did not improve the trend of lower scores and the line was moved back, teams did start to shoot more threes.

The Steph Curry phenomenon

In the 2010s, the rise of the Golden State Warriors sparked a 3-point revolution.

Led by two-time MVP Steph Curry, the Warriors’ heavy reliance on the 3-pointer helped them make the NBA Finals five years in a row, winning three championships.

Curry, who is more than 10cm shorter than the average NBA player, is credited with changing the game by regularly shooting “deep threes” from way behind the 3-point line. This allowed him more time to shoot over taller players.

It also changed how other teams defend because they have to cover more space to defend him. Consequentially, his teammates enjoy increased scoring opportunities.

Curry is the most successful 3-point shooter in NBA history. Kids now want to “be like Steph”.

WNBA All-Star Caitlin Clark has also been influential increasing the popularity of 3-pointers.

The role of analytics

Statistics-focused executives such as Daryl Morey also played a key role in the increasing popularity of 3-pointers.

They realised teams could score more points by shooting 3-pointers, even if they shot a slightly lower percentage.

For example, if a team takes ten 3-point shots and make 40% (four) of them, they will score 12 points (4x3 = 12). This is more than they will score if they take ten 2-point shots and make 50% (five) of them (5x2 = 10).

Under Morey’s leadership, the Houston Rockets became the first NBA team to attempt more 3-pointers than 2-pointers in a season. They did this from 2017 to 2020, when they won three consecutive division titles.

A statistical analysis across ten seasons from 2009–10 to 2018–19 also showed teams that took more 3-point shots had a higher probability of winning.

This rise in 3-pointers has come almost exclusively at the expense of mid-range shots.

Mid-range shots are shot from outside the paint but inside the 3-point line (roughly 3–7m from the basket).

The percentage of total shots from mid-range has plummeted from 31% in 2010–11 to just 13% a decade later, while shots in the paint (close to the basket) have remained relatively steady.

The 3-point line has improved the game by adding variety in offence, spreading players out and allowing players of different sizes and skills to be successful.

However, fans, players and commentators are starting to wonder whether there are now too many 3-pointers being shot.

Too much of a good thing?

The increased emphasis on 3-pointers in the NBA has coincided with a decline in viewership. Although these may not be related, it has sparked concerns.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver noted that while game attendance remained strong and fans enjoy the skill on display, he acknowledged some teams’ attacking plays can appear “cookie cutter” as teams mimic each other’s 3-point-heavy tactics.

NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal also stated the 3-point craze made games feel predictable, where “every team is running the same plays”.

Time for a change?

Suggestions from former players, coaches, commentators and spectators include moving the line further back, reducing the space available for shooting 3-pointers from the corner of the court, increasing overall court dimensions, adding a 4-point line or even capping teams’ 3-pointer attempts.

Silver says the league is open to exploring tweaks if they improve the balance between inside and outside play.

There are no plans to change yet, as any rule change will trigger flow-on effects for offence and defence that may not improve the game.

Vaughan Cruickshank, Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania and Tom Hartley, Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania

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

In the last few years, the hype around artificial intelligence has become stratospheric. Riding a wave of venture capital, tech leaders promised us AI would revolutionise work, boost productivity and lead to incredible new breakthroughs. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, set a new record when it attained US$110 billion in investments several months ago – and its CEO, Sam Altman, recently claimed Australia could become a “data capital of the world.”

Sky-high promises have been accompanied by sky-high investment in data centres, the sprawling server farms that power the training, execution, and maintenance of these models. A monstrous new hyperscale facility proposed for Sydney’s west – 1 gigawatt across 52 hectares – would rank among the world’s biggest. It will join 162 existing centres and 90 in the works across Australia, which is projected to be the world’s third largest data centre market by the early 2030s.

But if AI backers are all in, public sentiment is far more mixed. A new study ranked Australia equal lowest on the scale of global AI sentiment, with 81% supporting stronger rules for how organisations use AI and 68% worried about losing control over decisions made by AI on their behalf.

Grassroots movements against AI are growing. Last month, a “Stop the Slop” event challenging the Sydney data centre was relocated to a larger venue due to high interest. It joins other campaigns like StopAI and PauseAI that aim to slow down data centre development, ask how AI is impacting jobs and the environment, and consider more equitable and sustainable alternatives.

And in the last few months, videos have begun surfacing of students at commencement ceremonies booing speakers like former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who speak in rapturous tones about “standing on the edge of technological transformation” and how AI will touch “every profession”, “every classroom”, and “every relationship”.

Faith in these monumental claims – and the monumentally expensive infrastructure they rely on – is slipping.

What is the AI business model?

AI’s financial costs are astronomical. As tech critic Ed Zitron has shown over and over again, the major players are burning billions to keep models running, while lucrative profits remain tantalisingly out of reach. Some enterprises now spend more on rapidly rising token costs, the per-use cost of a model, than human workers. Even by cynical economic standards, the numbers don’t add up.

What exactly is the AI business model? Where is the killer app that will deliver genuine value and see millions of individuals or thousands of corporates pay costly subscription fees? “We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue,” admitted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2019, “once we build a generally intelligent system, we can ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return.” While the landscape has certainly shifted since then, use cases and revenue remain murky.

Hard evidence of AI’s contribution – rather than the vacuous claims of pitch decks and industry keynotes – remains largely elusive.

A recent survey of 6,000 senior business executives across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia found positive perceptions but a disappointing reality: around 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years. Another study, from MIT last year, found that 95% of generative AI pilots failed to deliver tangible financial value to the organisation, so were abandoned.

If the upsides are unclear, the negatives are increasingly apparent. Politically, generative AI provides the perfect weapon to “flood the zone” with misleading or outright false content, muddying the informational waters and amplifying division. Is Netanyahu alive or dead? AI fakes make it harder and harder to tell.

Socially, AI companions and models, gaining enormous trust with users via long-term conversations, have been cited in a growing series of court cases around suicides and mass shootings. A lawsuit filed this year described ChatGPT as an intimate and persuasive “suicide coach” who convinced a man in Colorado to end his own life.

And environmentally, the turn to the far higher computation that AI requires means massive impacts as data centres demand more power and more water, creating hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO² emissions. If the 41 planned data centres in Sydney are built, they will directly use 15–20% of Sydney’s water supply within a decade, predicts environmental accounting associate professor Michael Vardon.

Even if its social, environmental and political fallout is dismissed, AI hype and investment misses what is happening on the technical level. Models in the last decade became “smarter” essentially by training on larger and larger data sets. But this paradigm yields diminishing returns.

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, has warned that the correlation-based “learning” of models is both inefficient and insufficient when compared to human learning. Models require trillions of tokens to train. Even then, they reproduce patterns without deeper understanding, while children learn in a generalised manner from a handful of examples.

“Training is waning” is the new mantra, notes one Silicon Valley insider, as the brute force approach to foundational models gets left behind. It’s far from clear whether massive models, and the massive data centres that underpin them, will even be needed.

Where does this leave us? The possibility of the AI bubble bursting has shifted from a niche pocket of tech critics to mainstream policy wonks. “It’s time to start asking not whether there will be an AI crash, but what we should do today so that we are best prepared to respond to one tomorrow,” wrote two commentators in TIME magazine earlier this year.

What will this look like? Any answer here would include speculation. And yet we can garner some insights from previous bubble bursts, from tech development trends, and by extrapolating from the socio-cultural fallout we’ve already witnessed. Let’s step through each.

Another dot-com bubble

First, we can compare the AI bubble with the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Indeed, investment leaders – including The Big Short’s Michael Burry, who famously anticipated the collapse of the subprime mortgage market – are already seeing disturbing parallels between the two. Burry warns that venture capitalists are funding “loss-mak[ing] companies like never before in history”. As this suggests, the investments in this current AI bubble dwarf its dot-com analogue. If this bubble follows the blueprint of the last, we should expect to see massive layoffs in personnel and liquidations of AI startups with no discernible revenue.

Of course, like the first bubble, the deletion of a company doesn’t mean the technologies themselves disappear. Indeed, in the orthodox economic canon, the dot-com bubble was a “baptism of fire”: a painful but necessary rebirth. The trivial players, buoyed by “irrational” valuations, disappeared, but the network infrastructure they helped expand was the foundation for the truly innovative tech products to come.

Part of this “soft pop” future is almost certainly correct: the infrastructure will persist, even if underused. AI will continue being baked into a multitude of products, testing the market. And tech titans, sitting on data hoards and advertising monopolies, will march on. As scrutiny is increased, belt-tightening will occur. Companies will distil their product offerings, quietly begin limiting token use, and raise their subscription prices – all moves we’re already seeing play out.

But the larger question is whether tech companies – now just as then – actually contribute in meaningful ways to our broader world, or even merely our economies. As one Nobel-prize-winning economist famously quipped in the 1980s: “you can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

More recent analyses of contemporary technologies have echoed this finding, suggesting the internet has little impact on economic growth. If this is the case for AI – as the numbers, the lack of products and even the rhetoric of its chief pundits suggests – then we have a social question, not just a financial one. What price are we paying for a technology that fails to deliver even on its own terms?

Small is beautiful

Second, tech development is moving away from the “bigger is better” mantra. Models are becoming much smaller and more efficient. The push is from the cloud to the so-called “edge”: the far more mobile and low-powered devices, like your phone, where data is actually created and used. And there’s a push to move the focus from “capture it all” quantity to quality, with targeted or carefully curated data.

Some of this is a welcome — and long-needed — shift. A deluge of critical AI research in the last few years has extensively documented the major issues with bias in foundational models. In a not-so-shocking twist, indiscriminate training on a massive archive of social material with almost no oversight creates models that reproduce significant harms.

To take just two well known examples: AI models discriminate based on race and gender, while AI-generated images consistently privilege white people over people of colour.

Given these issues, the slower and more careful construction of models actually tailored to their communities and attuned to their language, needs, and desires can only be beneficial.

Some languages, for example Indigenous languages with strong oral traditions, are considered “low-resource”, or underrepresented, with much less material in standard training sets. Switch away from English, and see the accuracy of your response plummet.

Future developers might work closely with communities to create their own archive of material that better reflects their ideas and beliefs. Here we start to see a meaningful idea of data sovereignty, where groups maintain control over their models and the data that underpins them, slowly disconnecting from corporate cloud regimes.

Of course, if the “small and mobile is beautiful” approach attains real traction, this will mean today’s massive investment in highly centralised data centres is the wrong move.

What will happen to this massively overbuilt – and, we anticipate – soon underused infrastructure? In an ironic twist, dead shopping malls have been converted into data centres in the last two years to satisfy demand – yet these data centres might themselves become empty shells, physical reminders of an obsolete vision.

Post-AI pathologies

Third, AI cannot be stuffed back into Pandora’s box. Even if AI development takes another path, the socio-cultural, political and environmental fallout of a post-AI world will continue – or even become exacerbated.

In education, researchers warn that students who constantly turn to generative AI models exhibit a kind of “doom loop” of dependence: offloaded thinking gradually causes atrophy in critical thinking and reasoning. “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is […] they are not thinking for themselves,” state the authors of a Brookings Institution study.

They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.

In politics, cutting-edge image and video models make it increasingly difficult to parse fact from fiction. Gravity glitches and six-fingered hands are gone; new generative models like Nano Banana boast physically-aware rendering. Models can now produce photo-realistic news reports, for instance, that seem to show Ukraine president Zelensky surrendering.

The result is a growing pervasiveness of the “liar’s dividend”, where muddied lines mean even genuine material is doubted or dismissed as being synthetic. The ability of evidence to document atrocity and persuade the public is undermined, with each side accusing the other of fabricating media.

In the environmental sphere, the AI-driven boom in data centre construction will have long-term impacts. While society has begun to lower carbon emissions via electrification and renewables, AI’s voracious demands threaten to reverse this progress. Sustainable generative AI is a fallacy. “AI datacenters are single-handedly leading to a major reversal in climate progress globally,” declared tech critic Karen Hao, citing a recent UN report.

From the extraction of rare-earth minerals to the burning of dirty diesel as backup, the strain on local power grids, and the siphoning of millions of gallons of freshwater in a warming world — the damaging effects of AI supply chain capitalism – will be felt by the ecosystems and generations to come.

Rage against the machine

“I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI,” Daily Show comedian Ronny Chieng told Harvard graduates recently, to approving cheers — a far cry from the boos and anger that met AI evangelists advocates at similar ceremonies.

One strand of rising anti-AI sentiment is directed at data centres. A report found that US$64 billion of data projects have now been blocked or delayed amid local opposition. In one sense, of course, these wins are localised and limited: the “cloud” means data centres elsewhere can still run AI. But to see them as distractions from the bigger anti-tech battle is to miss the point. As tech critic Astra Taylor and community organiser Saul Levin argue,

This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?

These protests and campaigns signal a gulf between the current AI vision — “tokenmaxxing” in an “AI everywhere” world — and the desires of everyday individuals. Of course, this disparity alone doesn’t signal the death of the AI boom dream: history is full of examples of elites rolling out exploitative technologies that run roughshod over the wishes of the people.

But combined with other economic, social and environmental factors, these pushbacks begin to destabilise Big Tech’s future-on-rails. There are other possibilities — slower, smaller, more convivial, more sustainable — for technologies that contribute to our lives, our society and our world.

Luke Munn, Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland

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

For centuries, people have dreamed of undoing Babel.

Sci-fi novelists envisioned universal translators, and linguists devised international languages, all in pursuit of a world where one person could speak and another could understand, regardless of where either was born.

Artificial intelligence appears to be taking humanity one step closer toward that goal.

AI-powered tools are already being widely used by lawyers to translate legal documents from one language to the next. The mass market romance publisher Harlequin has turned to AI to translate its novels for international audiences. And hospitals are deploying AI translation to communicate directly with patients in multiple languages.

The speed and skill with which these AI-powered translation tools operate are certainly impressive.

But there is an important frontier for translation technology, one that it might never be able to breach: the poem.

That’s because translating poetry, thus far, has been a uniquely human experience. It demands intimate knowledge of two languages, which large language models certainly possess. But it also requires a mastery of different cultures and perspectives, what literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls a “worlding” of language and culture.

Pushing the limits of language

When scholars have studied the creativity of chatbots by prompting them to produce poetry, they’ve noticed that the poems tend to be more homogeneous and standardized than those written by humans.

Chatbots’ poetry translations have similar issues.

AI seems to struggle in three main areas: rendering metaphor, decoding complex sentence structure and creatively conveying mood or emotion.

To demonstrate these flaws, I worked closely with Adeeba Shahid Talukder, an award-winning poet and translator, to write this piece and to translate the 1953 poem “Mulāqāt,” or “Meeting,” composed by one of the most famous Urdu poets of the 20th century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Faiz was born in 1911 in Sialkot, in pre-Partition India. In 1947, when that area in the Punjab became part of present-day Pakistan, Faiz became a citizen of the newly founded country, though his relationship with it was marked by both hope and disillusionment. He lived in different parts of the world for long stretches of time, but he returned to Pakistan toward the end of his life. He died there in 1984.

His poetry is celebrated for its marriage of classical tropes like the ache of unfulfilled longing for the beloved — and the lover’s willingness to be consumed or destroyed in his pursuit of her — with the political struggles of his time, like the plight of working people and the dream of a Marxist revolution. His poetry is notoriously difficult to translate because of its highly ornate, extended metaphors, which have few easy equivalents in English. This forces the translator – be it human or machine – to push the limits of language.

From 1951 to 1955, Faiz was imprisoned on allegations of sedition against the Pakistani state. His first three months were spent in solitary confinement.

From Faiz’s letters, scholars learned that despite the isolation of his imprisonment, he felt as if the experience made him more attuned to his senses, as if he were “falling in love again for the first time.” His time in jail was also among his most prolific as a poet, with “Meeting” composed during his sentence.

Here’s our translation of the opening verses of “Meeting”:

 This night is the dark,
 lush tree of a grief greater
 than you and I—

 greater, for caravans 
 of torch-bearing stars 
 have lost themselves
 in the siege of its branches;

 in its shadow, a thousand moons 
 have wept away all their light.

 This night is the dark,
 lush tree of a grief greater
 than you and I—

 but from the tree of this very night 
 the amber leaves 
 of these moments 
 have fallen, 

 grown entangled 
 in your locks and flowered 
 as the fires of pomegranate 
 blossoms; its dew 

 has rained drops of silence 
 upon your brow, 
 bedecked it with a silver 
 string of pearls.

When prompted to provide a “lyrical translation into English,” ChatGPT produced the following:

 This night is a tree of pain,
 Vaster than you, vaster than me.

 Its branches bear
 Thousands of torches in place of stars,
 Caravans lost
 Within a thousand moons’ shadows,
 And all my light has wept itself away.

 Yet from this very tree,
 A few golden leaves of fleeting moments
 Fall into your hair,
 Entwined, they bloom like roses.

 From its dew in quiet,
 A few drops rest upon your brow,
 And glitter like tiny diamonds.

Chatbots fail at translation’s most basic task

When Faiz composed “Meeting,” he had been separated from his wife and two daughters for two years. He was keenly aware of missing parts of their childhoods that would never return.

This biographical information can help translators understand the poem’s exploration of “vaṣl,” or the meeting of lover and beloved. A common trope in classical Urdu poetry, it usually captures the joy and exultation of the lovers’ union.

But in Faiz’s poem, the union with the beloved also contains an acute awareness of mortality and the transience of beauty – a recognition of what has been lost, and the suffering still to come.

That’s why we rendered the opening lines of “Meeting” as “This night is the dark,/lush tree of a grief greater/than you and I.”

ChatGPT’s translation is more literal: “This night is the tree of pain.”

While there is nothing technically wrong with this translation, the chatbot’s version doesn’t capture the nuances of the tree metaphor and the way its dense, expansive branches can encompass the complexity and beauty of the emotions evoked by the night of the lovers’ union.

AI also fails to grasp the poem’s intricate sentence structure. ChatGPT has translated “in its shadow a thousand moons / have wept away all their light” as a nonsensical construction: “Within a thousand moons’ shadows, / And all my light has wept itself away.”

This error appears to have happened because the chatbot translated “apnā” – a reflexive possessive pronoun in Urdu – as “my,” inaccurately parsing it as referring to the speaker instead of the moons.

Finally, and most importantly, AI models lack the ability to express emotion the way a human can. A machine with no bodily experience of being human cannot meaningfully perceive a poem so enmeshed in human experience. Its engagement is merely superficial.

In its attempt to convey the mood of the original piece, ChatGPT offers: “From its dew in quiet, / A few drops rest upon your brow, / And glitter like tiny diamonds.”

It’s clear that ChatGPT is struggling to decode the grammatical structure of the poem and is trying to make the text lyrical enough to convey the awe and wonder of the original. But the model’s contrivances toward the lyrical – for example, describing diamonds as “tiny” or “glittering” – have no relation to the original poem.

“From its dew in quiet” is an incoherent clause. The phrase that seems to have thrown the model off is “isī kī shabnam se khāmoshī ke yeh cand qaṭre,” or “its dew / has rained drops of silence.”

Urdu literary critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has explained how Urdu poets “treat metaphor as fact and then go on to create further metaphors from that fact.” In “Meeting,” the metaphor of the night of the reunion as a tree becomes a fact, which allows for the flowering of a new metaphor – that of the dew on its leaves as drops of silence that fall on the lover and their beloved. These silences, heavy with sorrow, then adorn the beloved like precious jewels, conveying the idea that only a profound grief can beget such beauty.

The model has failed at conjuring this sense of wonder because it cannot parse the poem in accordance with the literary conventions of Urdu poetry.

ChatGPT prefaced its translated text by assuring us that it had “crafted a lyrical, poetic English version of Faiz’s ‘Mulāqāt,’ keeping the imagery, rhythm, and emotional flow intact so it reads like a poem rather than a literal translation.”

Yet as we have shown, its translation fails to accomplish the most basic task of literary translation: to convey the heart of the original.

Chatbots, in other words, are a poor substitute for the literary translator, and they bolster the assertion of the late Indian poet, scholar and translator A.K. Ramanujan that “only poems can translate poems.”

Adeeba Shahid Talukder helped with the research and writing of this article, in addition to the translation of Faiz’s poem.

Krupa Shandilya, Associate Professor of Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies, Amherst College

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

Ding – that’s an all too familiar sound, designed to instantly capture your attention.

The average adult receives at least 46 push notifications a day from their smartphone – roughly one every 20 minutes during waking hours.

These interruptions might seem like a small price to pay for staying connected. However, research shows these attention-grabbing features increase stress and reduce productivity. They can even have fatal consequences, with phone-related distraction claiming 29 lives on Australian roads each year.

In our modern world, it can feel impossible to focus on any one task. But science tells us there are ways you can reclaim your attention.

How attention works

A network of areas in the human brain controls our selective attention, the process by which we focus on relevant information and ignore the rest. Where attention goes is a balance between what your goals are, and what’s happening in the world around you. This means sudden or urgent events can capture your attention, and pull it away from what you’re trying to do.

From an evolutionary perspective, this helps keep us safe. Imagine you are foraging for berries, for example, when you hear the rustling of leaves. This sound would capture your attention and shift your focus from foraging to the potential threat – it may be a tiger about to pounce.

Today, however, our modern environments often hijack this same mechanism for things that are far less urgent or important – such as the buzz of a new friend request.

The trouble with tech

Digital platforms are designed to instantly capture and hold your attention, by tapping into the brain’s reward and motivation systems. This is why you may find it harder to resist distractions that offer some kind of reward, such as a “like” on your post. It also makes it more difficult to stick to tasks that require sustained attention.

Research suggests these frequent interruptions may be reducing our ability to concentrate – not by affecting our fundamental ability to focus, but by increasing how often we switch between activities.

The myth of multitasking is that we can do two demanding tasks at once. However, our attention is capacity limited, which means we can’t simultaneously process everything that’s happening around us. “Multitasking” is actually task switching, or rapidly swapping between tasks rather than doing both at the same time. Research consistently shows task switching impairs how well we do one or both tasks, no matter how familiar or predictable the task is.

What you can do

Many factors influence your ability to pay attention – ranging from how well you sleep to whether you have certain health conditions, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

However, we can build up our “attention muscles” by making some minor lifestyle changes.

1. Limit distractions from devices

You can do this by setting up “focus” modes on your phone. These automatically filter out distractions by limiting how many notifications you get, particularly while working or driving. Or turn off all notifications from apps and schedule specific times to check them – say for ten minutes before lunch – and set timers to keep yourself accountable.

Apps that track your screen time may help, but avoid those that gamify how much time you spend off your phone. Ironically, these game-like features are also designed to draw in your attention. Instead, opt for tools that discourage use and provide data that can help you reflect on your screen habits.

2. Choose activities that require focus

The evidence is clear that constantly switching between tasks weakens our focus. To combat this, prioritise activities that demand sustained attention.

Research shows doing immersive activities – such as playing music and competitive sport – a few times a week may improve your ability to pay attention. This could be because these activities require you to pay attention for longer periods, to achieve a specific goal.

You can also use tools such as Pomodoro timers, which help you alternate between 25-minute intervals of focused work and five-minute breaks.

3. Reduce your overall tech use

Research shows people who avoid using devices before bedtime and keep them out of bedrooms sleep better. Studies also show these practices may improve your focus the following day.

And when you have a free moment, don’t immediately pick up your device. Research suggests regularly pausing to let your mind wander allows your brain to process information and form new connections between different concepts and experiences, leaving room for creativity to flourish.

In the end, reclaiming your attention doesn’t necessarily require rigid rules or strict routines. It starts with small, intentional acts of presence. Attention is a precious resource, so let’s invest it wisely.

Patricia Morada Macabulos, PhD Candidate, Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Macquarie University and Anina Rich, Professor, Performance & Expertise Research Centre and School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University

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

The NASA Artemis program, now supported by 67 countries under the Artemis Accords, plans to return humans to the Moon by 2028. A recent White House Executive Order has gone further, directing NASA to establish a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.

China also has plans to build a lunar base by 2035.

Building the first long-term habitat on another world will push our engineering to its limits. But lunar architecture isn’t just an engineering challenge. At its heart, it is about understanding human experience at the extremes – and how it can help improve conditions for those already living at the edges here on Earth.

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.

The challenge of building a lunar base

Building on the Moon means dealing with the brutal realities of a near-perfect vacuum and unfiltered space radiation. We have some experience with such challenges from orbital habitats like the International Space Station, but there are additional conditions to contend with.

The lunar surface is covered in razor-sharp dust, or regolith, which is abrasive enough to cut through astronaut suits and destroy machinery. And the extreme temperature swings from below -200°C to over +120°C across a lunar day places severe thermal stress on building materials, which expand and contract with every cycle.

Transporting building materials from Earth will be prohibitively expensive, so current solutions focus on using locally available regolith to 3D print monolithic shells. But the lack of atmosphere on the Moon brings another unique challenge.

Micrometeorites rain down like tiny bullets at speeds of up to 72 kilometres per second, easily puncturing structures. A 3D-printed monolithic shell, once damaged, will be difficult to repair.

Our research explores modular block-based construction that can be easily disassembled and repaired by human-robot teams. Our work with colleagues at the NASA funded RETHi facilities at the University of Texas at San Antonio is helping us understand how local damage by micrometeorites effects the whole system, so we can design for repair.

The challenge of living on a lunar base

Lunar architecture is not just about survival. It gives us the chance to ask what it means to actually live in extreme conditions, and what that reveals about human experience more broadly.

For instance, what happens when people have to spend long periods in isolation or confined spaces, with no opportunity to step outside? This is not unique to space. Many of us experienced this during COVID, and others live it routinely on submarines, mining outposts and Antarctic stations.

Research shows that most people in such conditions describe time as feeling distorted, leading to higher stress and reduced social satisfaction. When days become repetitive and monotonous, and the future feels uncertain, time stops being meaningful.

Drawing on design psychology, we work with people who have lived or worked in isolated and confined conditions to understand how design can help. Small details – a private space to retreat to, lighting adjusted to personal rhythm, a window with a view – can have a considerable impact on emotional wellbeing and morale.

The psychological toll of living in extreme environments is inseparable from its physical demands. How do we keep the human body operating safely in these extreme conditions, and what happens when someone is injured far from help?

Again, this is not unique to space. Biomechanics research already helps us understand how joints and muscles move, preventing workplace injuries and supporting rehabilitation. But strip away Earth’s gravity, and everyday movements, like climbing a flight of stairs, reveal something new about how the body really works.

Our research uses gravity-offload experiments to study how the arms, shoulders and torso work together to lift and stabilise the body as gravity changes. The findings can inform the design of stairs and handrails for lunar habitats, making movement more efficient and preventing injury.

What this means for life on Earth

The construction industry accounts for roughly half of all global material extraction and around 30% of waste and carbon dioxide emissions – much of it because buildings are demolished rather than repaired.

The repairability and human-robot collaboration principles we are developing for lunar architecture offer a model for circular construction here on Earth, where maintaining buildings rather than tearing them down could transform the industry’s environmental footprint.

Our research on the psychology of isolation can also improve life for people stationed at polar research bases, in remote communities, or even in prison. And our biomechanics research, focusing on how forces redistribute between the upper and lower body, can help older people to climb stairs more safely, avoid falls and recover from injury.

Lunar architecture research is not about a distant, futuristic idea. It is about understanding human experience at the extremes, and using that understanding to ask better questions about how we design for people here on Earth. Humanity already lives at the edges. Learning to design for those edge conditions can teach us how to dwell more inclusively on this planet, and beyond.

Amit Srivastava, Senior Lecturer, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University ; Kato Claeys, PhD Candidate, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University ; Meriem Allani, PhD Candidate, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University , and Monika Stankiewicz, PhD Candidate, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University

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

In the contemporary imagination, the word “avatar” may conjure James Cameron’s blue Na’vi people.

But Cameron was partly inspired by the avatars (or incarnations) of the the Hindu deity Vishnu, who sent avatars to earth to preserve universal order.

For over 15 centuries, Vishnu has been seen as a sustainer and a guardian of dharma – order, morality and righteousness – who has access to ten or more human and animal avatars.

Mostly, Vishnu is depicted by artists with blue skin, marking his separation from humanity. He evokes the colour of the cosmos and, as his avatar Krishna, the deep blue of brooding monsoonal cloud.

Avatar: Forms of Vishnu at the Art Gallery of New South Wales draws on these deep cultural roots. The gallery presents 200 artworks spanning 1,500 years, from international and Australian collections.

Many objects, notably early sculpture from Cambodia, have never before travelled from their home countries.

The highly crafted and carved objects open intriguing mythological narratives, exploring Vishnu’s long importance in Hindu cultures and to contemporary Australia.

A prescient exhibition

The exhibition takes audiences on a deep dive into the sumptuous colour, craft, tradition and artistry inspired by and honouring the avatars of this important figure.

Contemporary works add magic to the historic, conveying the continuum of tradition into current practice.

Avatar comes from the Sanskrit word avatāra, meaning “descent”. At the press preview, co-curator Chaitanya Sambrani called Vishnu a holistic presence, “a being that is everywhere, everything, and in everyone; an omnipresent force with different personas”.

For Sambrani, it is important to understand this presence exists “against the strictures of organised religion. We may have our own personal experience of Vishnu beyond the limitations of the self.”

Three years in the making, the exhibition feels prescient. Amid political division, ecological instability and debates around identity, Vishnu’s avatars – manifesting to create order from disorder – feel unexpectedly contemporary.

Enduring storytelling

The endurance of these stories is beautifully expressed. There is the juxtaposition of artworks old and new, in diverse media – textiles, carving, gold, embroidery, paint, sculpture, bronze, papercuts and watercolour.

One work of carved sandstone from Cambodia in the early 800s depicts a four-armed lord holding a discus, conch, club and globe. Its simplicity – a naturalistic figure decorated only with a cylindrical headpiece and skirt cloth (sampot) – alludes to Vishnu’s status with the Khmer kings.

Behind this sculpture hang two large contemporary paintings by Desmond Lazaro.

Lazaro describes the foundational Hindu story in The Churning of the Ocean of Milk (2026), paired with his Mount Mandara (2026).

The first, a circular form painted in colours from hand-ground ochres, describes the coming together of gods and demons to churn the ocean to retrieve the nectar of immortality, releasing both poison and divine treasure.

A soapstone carving of Lakshmi Narasimha, Vishnu’s man-lion avatar, from Odisha, India in the 1200s, is framed by Threshold (2026), a contemporary installation crafted in cotton and silk by Sumakshi Singh.

Elements highlighted for contemporary audiences include the feminist consciousness in these stories. The energy of the shakti from their female consorts is crucial to Vishnu’s avatars to complete their tasks.

Human transformation

The final theme of the exhibition is titled Vishnu’s Cosmos. The vibrant Kaavad shrine (2015) by Satyanarayan Suthar draws cars and planes together with gods and goddesses in a traditional kaavad (portable folding storyboard).

An intriguing series of printed oleographs (prints made to resemble paintings) from the art publisher Rami Varma Press (1894–1972) are sumptuously decorated with embroidery, cloth and sequins to honour the deities.

A sandstone carving of Vajimukha (Hayagriva or Kalkin) from the late 500s or early 600s guards this final gallery. The figure is bare-chested, with a simple skirt falling below the knee, and horsehead sitting naturalistically on human shoulders.

The head may refer to Vishu’s final avatar Kalki, prophesied to appear during a conflict-riddled time, promising a new age of truth and virtue.

This is the first Australian exhibition devoted to Vishnu, and the largest to focus on South and Southeast Asian art for 20 years. In this, Avatar acknowledges an evolving cultural landscape and the growing proportion of Australians with a South and Southeast Asian background.

In this exhibition, mythology is positioned as an adaptive visual language through which artists explore identity, resilience, morality, devotion and the potential in human transformation.

Avatar: Forms of Vishnu is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until October 5.

Louise Martin-Chew, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland

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

Earlier this month the University of Sydney launched an investigation into allegations miniature spy cameras were used to record and distribute exam content online.

At the same time, the UK’s national examinations regulator warned smart glasses, smartwatches and concealed earpieces are emerging threats for unis.

Chief regulator of qualifications Sir Ian Bauckham noted technology was “changing fast”:

There are smartwatches that we are increasingly seeing on young people and they are fully internet connected […] And I understand that in the pipeline there are even things like smart glasses […]

There is a renewed emphasis on having in-person exams in response to AI. University administrators have traditionally regarded in-person, invigilated exams as the most reliable way of ensuring students don’t cheat.

But the rise of these new wearable technologies could undermine this approach.

So what can Australian universities do in response?

A new generation of tech

Cheating in examinations is of course not new. Students have long relied on handwritten notes, information hidden on clothing, or materials accessed during bathroom breaks.

In 2022, a Spanish law student even gained media attention after engraving tiny notes onto plastic pens for an exam years earlier.

However, new types of wearable technology are changing how students can cheat.

Among the most significant developments are AI-enabled smart glasses with built-in microphones and cameras.

These can display AI-generated text, process spoken language and analyse written materials. They can be hard to distinguish from everyday glasses.

Research suggests even when images captured by smart glasses were blurry and warped, AI could still extract enough information to answer some exam questions correctly.

Alongside covert recording devices, micro earpieces are also available, allowing answers to be relayed to candidates.

Screen-enabled pens can also display and generate text, allowing users to access notes while appearing to use a normal pen.

Meanwhile, smartwatches remain a cheating risk. They can store notes, display text discreetly, and in some cases connect to other devices, the internet and AI chat functions.

As a 2026 paper by Australian researchers noted, transparent wearable AI – particularly AI-enabled smart glasses – are difficult for exam invigilators to detect.

How widespread is the issue?

We do not yet have robust data on Australian usage of smart devices for cheating.

But in the United Kingdom, the exam regulator reported 2,225 cases involving mobile phones and smart devices for tertiary and senior school exams in 2025. This accounted for 44.3% of all cheating cases.

China is also grappling with the issue. This month, its Ministry of Education warned bringing smart devices to exams, including smart glasses, counts as cheating.

Numerous Chinese provinces also introduced tighter exam security measures at the same time, including mandatory inspections of candidates’ glasses, manual checks and a wider rollout of smart security gates. These are electronic screening checkpoints that detect banned devices.

In Japan, covert recordings in 2024 prompted universities to take stricter security measures for exams.

What can we do?

In Australia, some universities have banned smart devices in supervised exams.

However, smart devices cannot be addressed through traditional invigilation alone.

Universities need to update policies to explicitly address smart glasses, AI earbuds and other wearable technologies. Invigilators require training to recognise devices. For example, thick-framed smart glasses, active indicator lights, concealed earpieces and screen-enabled pens.

Universities may also need to consider having exam rooms monitored by device screening technology, and secure storage procedures for prohibited items. While such systems involve upfront costs, they are already being used in China. This suggests the technology is commercially available and operationally feasible in universities.

Other changes are needed

Assessment design also needs to evolve. Exams that focus primarily on memorisation are more vulnerable to cheating than those requiring critical thinking, problem-solving and application of knowledge.

Universities should also improve systems to collect data on technology-enabled cheating. This will allow policies to be guided by evidence.

At the same time, institutions must avoid creating inequitable surveillance practices. Intensive scrutiny of glasses and hearing aids and what students are wearing may discriminate against students with disabilities, chronic health conditions and religious dress requirements. So universities face the challenge of balancing academic integrity with inclusion and accessibility.

Undermining academic integrity

If students are cheating on exams and unis don’t realise, the consequences extend beyond individual cases of misconduct.

Public trust in university qualifications may be weakened. As the UK regulator noted,

you end up with grades for qualifications which are no longer reliable, no longer trustworthy.

The challenge for higher education is not simply preventing cheating. It is ensuring assessment remains valid, credible and equitable in a world where AI and other technology is increasingly embedded into everyday devices and learning.

Meena Jha, Associate Professor, College of Information & Communication Technology, CQUniversity Australia

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

The story of Stonehenge starts around 5,000 years ago. But its famous old stones, some of which were transported all the way from south-west Wales to Wiltshire, are just part of the story.

Close to the beginning of its use, the site was a cemetery, with dozens of people laid to rest. That so many changes have been made to the site since – almost all involving huge commitments of human labour and creativity – is testament to Stonehenge’s significance to countless generations of people.

Its continuing fascination was demonstrated by a 2022 British Museum exhibition that attracted 190,000 visitors to its collection of prehistoric objects from 36 European institutions. Now, that physical exhibition has been brought to virtual life in a new collaboration between researchers at the University of Reading, including myself, and the museum.

Users of The Virtual World of Stonehenge – released to coincide with the summer solstice – can go deep inside Stonehenge and watch it change through time.

They can closely examine one of the bluestones that was very likely brought to Stonehenge from Wales, or an ancient pounder tool used to shape the sarsen stones that were excavated much closer to the site.

With the help of English Heritage, which manages Stonehenge, we have also reconstructed how this megalithic structure might have looked through different phases of its existence.

Users can also travel further afield to view the evolving landscape of ritual monuments around England – for example, to Neolithic flint mines at Grimes Graves in Norfolk. Here are some more of the ancient places and artefacts you can discover today without leaving your armchair.

The Coneybury pit

The pottery, animal bones and flint tools in this display were all excavated from a pit close to Stonehenge – but they pre-dated the stones by almost a thousand years. It was among the less spectacular assemblages in the 2022 exhibition, yet had a fascinating story to tell.

The pit held the remains of a feast enjoyed by hunter-gatherers and the first farmer communities some 5,900 years ago. Those gathered ate farmed beef and hunted venison.

Chemical analysis of the remains shows the cattle and deer consumed came from different places – and that the meat was prepared in different ways. As a coming together of worldviews, languages, customs and traditions, the remains of this shared meal marked the end of thousands of years of a hunter-gatherer way of life.

The virtual experience enables users to watch an animated video telling the story of this meeting, and explains how archaeologists pieced together its story.

Seahenge

In 1998, a well-preserved timber circle emerged from the shores of Holme-next-the-Sea, on the coast of Norfolk. It was soon dubbed Seahenge owing to its similarity to timber circles that had once stood in the Stonehenge landscape.

The Holme circle was originally built on a saltmarsh, between land and sea, and consisted of 55 large oak posts. A narrow entranceway was positioned exactly to align on the Sun’s path, so that the midsummer rising Sun illuminated the interior of the monument.

From a study of the tree rings, it is known that Seahenge was built in the spring or summer of 2049 BC, at a time when stone tools and weapons were rapidly being replaced by metal as the material of choice for social and economic life – and also for offerings to supernatural forces.

During that period, circles of wood and stone were in decline. Seahenge was constructed near the end of a religious tradition that had lasted for almost a millennium.

In the virtual experience, you can listen to the “Seahenge soundscape” created by the artists Rose Ferraby and Rob St John. Their work added a spine-tingling dimension to the British Museum’s display of these ancient timbers.

A 6,000-year-old leaf

A humble object that captured many people’s imagination during the British Museum exhibition was a single elm leaf. This delicate specimen fell around 6,000 years ago near an early farming settlement on the coast of Lancashire.

Deforestation has played a key role in European history ever since then. Hard-won clearances could be filled by trees in a human lifespan, while woodland continued to provide vital resources to support the farming way of life.

Near this ancient leaf, we displayed a wall holding 89 stone axes – each representing a generation of human lives during the primary period covered by the exhibition (circa 4000-1500 BC). Many would have been used to chop down trees thousands of years ago – clearing land for crops and monuments, as well as providing wood for building.

Folkton chalk ‘drums’

These three carefully-carved chalk treasures accompanied the body of a small child buried 5,000 years ago in Folkton, North Yorkshire. The eyes peering out from above abstract motifs on the largest and smallest of the sculptures might have been created with the fate and protection of a loved and vulnerable child in mind.

This enigmatic group of objects was excavated in the 1860s. The drums, placed carefully along the line of the child’s back, work well as a set: their size is incremental and all three have similar decorative schemes.

The patterns share the same repertoire of concentric circles, lozenges, zigzags, chevrons and parallel lines found elsewhere across Britain and Ireland. But intriguingly, two of the drums have a motif of eyes with eyebrows insinuated in the design – hinting at a daring, possibly dangerous, reference to a person or spirit embodied within.

In The Virtual World of Stonehenge, you can explore these fascinating and intricately carved objects in 3D, along with a similar drum found much more recently at Burton Agnes. This one was placed with three children of different ages buried close together, the two youngest poignantly holding hands.

Duncan Garrow, Professor of Archaeology, University of Reading

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

What if protecting your brain from dementia was as simple as wiggling your little fingers a few seconds each day? That’s the promise behind “pinky time”, a viral TikTok trend that claims a simple finger exercise can lower your risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Videos promoting this supposed brain-health hack have attracted millions of views, with some suggesting that difficulty performing the movement could be a warning sign of cognitive decline. By arranging the fingers into a specific pattern and moving the pinkies up and down, proponents argue you are giving your brain a quick workout that keeps it sharp.

It’s easy to see why the idea has gained attention. A free, effortless daily habit that protects against one of the most feared conditions of ageing is an appealing prospect. But while the trend draws loosely on real neuroscience, the conclusions being made are far more ambitious than the evidence allows.

Doing something fiddly and new with your fingers, such as learning new chords on a guitar, takes real concentration. Your brain has to plan each movement, hold back the wrong ones, and constantly adjust based on what you are seeing and what your fingers are feeling.

That’s a surprising amount of mental work for such a small physical task, and it may help explain why hands-on hobbies such as learning a musical instrument or knitting are associated with sharper memory and better brain function.

For years, scientists have used finger-tapping tasks, where people repeatedly tap a finger or follow a simple rhythm, to study how movement, attention and the ageing brain are connected. However, these tasks are used as research tools and should not be confused with scientific tests for dementia or memory loss.

There’s another idea behind this: the brain can rewire itself in response to what we ask it to do, building new connections as we learn. So when you learn a new finger movement, you’re encouraging your brain to strengthen and reorganise neural connections involved in that task.

In this sense, pinky time fits into a broader category of activities that challenge the brain through novelty and coordination. From juggling to dancing or learning a new language, these sorts of tasks may help keep the brain resilient as we age.

Performing unfamiliar movements can feel mentally demanding, but it does not mean it can diagnose cognitive decline or protect against it. Many factors influence how well someone performs a finger coordination task, including mobility, flexibility, previous injuries and practice. A healthy person may struggle with this movement task, while someone with cognitive impairment may perform it with ease.

Looking for easy fixes

The popularity of pinky time highlights that people are increasingly looking for simple ways to monitor and protect their brain health. Unfortunately, detecting the earliest stages of cognitive decline is considerably more complex.

Doctors and researchers use carefully developed tests that measure many aspects of cognition, including memory, attention, language and “executive functioning” (the planning, organising and self-control skills we use to perform daily tasks).

There is currently no evidence that struggling with this particular finger movement predicts early memory or thinking problems, and no strong evidence that practising it can prevent cognitive decline.

Research on various hand and finger exercises has reported modest benefits in people who already have some cognitive difficulties. But there isn’t much evidence yet, and it’s not clear whether the benefits are big enough to help protect against dementia.

Another limitation is that the brain benefits most from activities that remain difficult. As a task becomes familiar, it requires less attention and cognitive effort. A movement that feels difficult today may become largely automatic after repeated practice, reducing its value as a brain workout.

What is known to work

Unfortunately, there’s no single trick to keeping your brain sharp as you age. What does seem to matter is much broader – staying active, looking after your heart, getting enough sleep and keeping up your social life. There’s also growing evidence that something as simple as sorting out your hearing or eyesight can help too, because it makes it easier to stay socially and mentally switched on.

A healthy diet, particularly one resembling the Mediterranean diet, has also been linked to better brain health. Lifelong learning, whether through education, hobbies, languages, music or other mentally stimulating activities, also seems to help.

Pinky time as a coordination challenge may be fun and harmless. But its viral promise oversimplifies a much more complex picture. When it comes to protecting our brains, the evidence still favours the less glamorous fundamentals: exercise, sleep, healthy diet, social connection, good sensory health and lifelong learning.

Monika McAtarsney-Kovacs, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuropsychology, Anglia Ruskin University

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

The NASA Artemis program, now supported by 67 countries under the Artemis Accords, plans to return humans to the Moon by 2028. A recent White House Executive Order has gone further, directing NASA to establish a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.

China also has plans to build a lunar base by 2035.

Building the first long-term habitat on another world will push our engineering to its limits. But lunar architecture isn’t just an engineering challenge. At its heart, it is about understanding human experience at the extremes – and how it can help improve conditions for those already living at the edges here on Earth.

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.

The challenge of building a lunar base

Building on the Moon means dealing with the brutal realities of a near-perfect vacuum and unfiltered space radiation. We have some experience with such challenges from orbital habitats like the International Space Station, but there are additional conditions to contend with.

The lunar surface is covered in razor-sharp dust, or regolith, which is abrasive enough to cut through astronaut suits and destroy machinery. And the extreme temperature swings from below -200°C to over +120°C across a lunar day places severe thermal stress on building materials, which expand and contract with every cycle.

Transporting building materials from Earth will be prohibitively expensive, so current solutions focus on using locally available regolith to 3D print monolithic shells. But the lack of atmosphere on the Moon brings another unique challenge.

Micrometeorites rain down like tiny bullets at speeds of up to 72 kilometres per second, easily puncturing structures. A 3D-printed monolithic shell, once damaged, will be difficult to repair.

Our research explores modular block-based construction that can be easily disassembled and repaired by human-robot teams. Our work with colleagues at the NASA funded RETHi facilities at the University of Texas at San Antonio is helping us understand how local damage by micrometeorites effects the whole system, so we can design for repair.

The challenge of living on a lunar base

Lunar architecture is not just about survival. It gives us the chance to ask what it means to actually live in extreme conditions, and what that reveals about human experience more broadly.

For instance, what happens when people have to spend long periods in isolation or confined spaces, with no opportunity to step outside? This is not unique to space. Many of us experienced this during COVID, and others live it routinely on submarines, mining outposts and Antarctic stations.

Research shows that most people in such conditions describe time as feeling distorted, leading to higher stress and reduced social satisfaction. When days become repetitive and monotonous, and the future feels uncertain, time stops being meaningful.

Drawing on design psychology, we work with people who have lived or worked in isolated and confined conditions to understand how design can help. Small details – a private space to retreat to, lighting adjusted to personal rhythm, a window with a view – can have a considerable impact on emotional wellbeing and morale.

The psychological toll of living in extreme environments is inseparable from its physical demands. How do we keep the human body operating safely in these extreme conditions, and what happens when someone is injured far from help?

Again, this is not unique to space. Biomechanics research already helps us understand how joints and muscles move, preventing workplace injuries and supporting rehabilitation. But strip away Earth’s gravity, and everyday movements, like climbing a flight of stairs, reveal something new about how the body really works.

Our research uses gravity-offload experiments to study how the arms, shoulders and torso work together to lift and stabilise the body as gravity changes. The findings can inform the design of stairs and handrails for lunar habitats, making movement more efficient and preventing injury.

What this means for life on Earth

The construction industry accounts for roughly half of all global material extraction and around 30% of waste and carbon dioxide emissions – much of it because buildings are demolished rather than repaired.

The repairability and human-robot collaboration principles we are developing for lunar architecture offer a model for circular construction here on Earth, where maintaining buildings rather than tearing them down could transform the industry’s environmental footprint.

Our research on the psychology of isolation can also improve life for people stationed at polar research bases, in remote communities, or even in prison. And our biomechanics research, focusing on how forces redistribute between the upper and lower body, can help older people to climb stairs more safely, avoid falls and recover from injury.

Lunar architecture research is not about a distant, futuristic idea. It is about understanding human experience at the extremes, and using that understanding to ask better questions about how we design for people here on Earth. Humanity already lives at the edges. Learning to design for those edge conditions can teach us how to dwell more inclusively on this planet, and beyond.

Amit Srivastava, Senior Lecturer, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University ; Kato Claeys, PhD Candidate, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University ; Meriem Allani, PhD Candidate, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University , and Monika Stankiewicz, PhD Candidate, Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, Adelaide University

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

In the contemporary imagination, the word “avatar” may conjure James Cameron’s blue Na’vi people.

But Cameron was partly inspired by the avatars (or incarnations) of the the Hindu deity Vishnu, who sent avatars to earth to preserve universal order.

For over 15 centuries, Vishnu has been seen as a sustainer and a guardian of dharma – order, morality and righteousness – who has access to ten or more human and animal avatars.

Mostly, Vishnu is depicted by artists with blue skin, marking his separation from humanity. He evokes the colour of the cosmos and, as his avatar Krishna, the deep blue of brooding monsoonal cloud.

Avatar: Forms of Vishnu at the Art Gallery of New South Wales draws on these deep cultural roots. The gallery presents 200 artworks spanning 1,500 years, from international and Australian collections.

Many objects, notably early sculpture from Cambodia, have never before travelled from their home countries.

The highly crafted and carved objects open intriguing mythological narratives, exploring Vishnu’s long importance in Hindu cultures and to contemporary Australia.

A prescient exhibition

The exhibition takes audiences on a deep dive into the sumptuous colour, craft, tradition and artistry inspired by and honouring the avatars of this important figure.

Contemporary works add magic to the historic, conveying the continuum of tradition into current practice.

Avatar comes from the Sanskrit word avatāra, meaning “descent”. At the press preview, co-curator Chaitanya Sambrani called Vishnu a holistic presence, “a being that is everywhere, everything, and in everyone; an omnipresent force with different personas”.

For Sambrani, it is important to understand this presence exists “against the strictures of organised religion. We may have our own personal experience of Vishnu beyond the limitations of the self.”

Three years in the making, the exhibition feels prescient. Amid political division, ecological instability and debates around identity, Vishnu’s avatars – manifesting to create order from disorder – feel unexpectedly contemporary.

Enduring storytelling

The endurance of these stories is beautifully expressed. There is the juxtaposition of artworks old and new, in diverse media – textiles, carving, gold, embroidery, paint, sculpture, bronze, papercuts and watercolour.

One work of carved sandstone from Cambodia in the early 800s depicts a four-armed lord holding a discus, conch, club and globe. Its simplicity – a naturalistic figure decorated only with a cylindrical headpiece and skirt cloth (sampot) – alludes to Vishnu’s status with the Khmer kings.

Behind this sculpture hang two large contemporary paintings by Desmond Lazaro.

Lazaro describes the foundational Hindu story in The Churning of the Ocean of Milk (2026), paired with his Mount Mandara (2026).

The first, a circular form painted in colours from hand-ground ochres, describes the coming together of gods and demons to churn the ocean to retrieve the nectar of immortality, releasing both poison and divine treasure.

A soapstone carving of Lakshmi Narasimha, Vishnu’s man-lion avatar, from Odisha, India in the 1200s, is framed by Threshold (2026), a contemporary installation crafted in cotton and silk by Sumakshi Singh.

Elements highlighted for contemporary audiences include the feminist consciousness in these stories. The energy of the shakti from their female consorts is crucial to Vishnu’s avatars to complete their tasks.

Human transformation

The final theme of the exhibition is titled Vishnu’s Cosmos. The vibrant Kaavad shrine (2015) by Satyanarayan Suthar draws cars and planes together with gods and goddesses in a traditional kaavad (portable folding storyboard).

An intriguing series of printed oleographs (prints made to resemble paintings) from the art publisher Rami Varma Press (1894–1972) are sumptuously decorated with embroidery, cloth and sequins to honour the deities.

A sandstone carving of Vajimukha (Hayagriva or Kalkin) from the late 500s or early 600s guards this final gallery. The figure is bare-chested, with a simple skirt falling below the knee, and horsehead sitting naturalistically on human shoulders.

The head may refer to Vishu’s final avatar Kalki, prophesied to appear during a conflict-riddled time, promising a new age of truth and virtue.

This is the first Australian exhibition devoted to Vishnu, and the largest to focus on South and Southeast Asian art for 20 years. In this, Avatar acknowledges an evolving cultural landscape and the growing proportion of Australians with a South and Southeast Asian background.

In this exhibition, mythology is positioned as an adaptive visual language through which artists explore identity, resilience, morality, devotion and the potential in human transformation.

Avatar: Forms of Vishnu is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until October 5.

Louise Martin-Chew, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland

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

The Lowy Institute’s annual poll, released this week, carried two important signals for politicians and other policy makers about Australian multiculturalism. One was reassuring, the other an amber light.

Nearly three in four (73%) say Australia’s “cultural diversity” has been positive. This indicates multiculturalism’s roots remain firmly in the ground, despite the winds blowing in troubled times.

But there had been a big drop from the 90% level registered in 2024, when the question was last asked. Lowy said this was “the largest movement on any societal question” in the poll’s more than two decade history.

The 2026 result was likely influenced by the question being asked just months after Bondi, which has had a profound impact on community thinking. Nevertheless, the decline is a warning to be heeded, lest this turns into a serious downward trend.

Unsurprisingly, Pauline Hanson is stoking negativity about multiculturalism, with her declaration last week that Australia was multiracial but must be “monocultural”.

That triggered political gyrations in which Opposition Leader Angus Taylor once again showed his ineptness when, under intense questioning, he refused to commit to multiculturalism. He later tried to clean up the mess, but ended up in contortions.

Hanson herself was all over the place in trying to clarify “monoculture”, citing Japan initially, then pivoting to the Socceroos.

Anthony Albanese invoked history in a word salad illustrating that we were always diverse, reaching back to the First Fleet, where “there were some in chains and some who were in charge of the people in chains”.

Political own goals and point scoring aside, multicultural policy will be front and centre in coming months, requiring the government to respond.

The royal commission on antisemitism has as part of its brief to examine “social cohesion”. Its report, due in December, will highlight the challenges facing multiculturalism in the age of terrorism and community fractures.

Like much else, multiculturalism is buffeted in a contemporary environment that’s much less conducive to social harmony than once was the case.

Many economic and social factors are at play in this, not least the poison social media can inject. As ASIO chief Mike Burgess said on Wednesday in his 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, “Social media is amplifying and accelerating grievance narratives, eroding trust in institutions, promoting discord and inflammatory rhetoric, exacerbating polarisation and creating a permissive environment for violence”.

There is a strong case for a reset of multicultural policy, both to make it more resilient and to sustain community appreciation of its contribution. An earlier opportunity was missed, after the government’s Multiculturalism Framework Review in its first term but now the task is urgent.

Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs Julian Hill this week put forward some directions for reform.

Hill, who gave a major speech on the issue earlier this year, told a local government audience on Tuesday:

The question isn’t whether we will be diverse. To those who want to argue that question, look around! Clearly, we will. The question is whether we’ll remain successful – whether our human diversity will remain a source of national strength.

While Hill said he was “fundamentally optimistic”, “I do believe that we’re going to need to put more deliberate effort, as leaders and policy makers, in the coming months and years than perhaps we’ve been used to”.

Hill makes the important distinction between “bonding capital”, which glues people into groups (or tribes) and “bridging capital”, that links groups. He urges more emphasis on the latter.

Hill also points out that much of the responsibility for this effort must fall on states and local government, not just the federal government, which often has a funding rather than an implementation role. In this context, the Sydney’s Randwick City Council, covering an area with many Muslim and Jewish residents, has a plan going to its meeting next week on social cohesion and intercultural engagement.

Hill told his audience:

We need to actively think about funding activities that bring groups together, about sharing spaces, because so many of our funding programs now actually fund separate events and then we build everyone a centre and then we put walls up and then we put security up.

So, we want people to share, and that could look like investing in community intercultural resilience, Jewish-Muslim, migrant-mainstream, interfaith youth, cross-cultural sports teams or competitions.

Local government has perhaps the most important role. We can set a policy direction – that’s part of our job federally. We can incentivise things – and we will see that increasingly in multicultural grants focusing on that intercultural, interfaith piece - but most of this work happens at the local level. We don’t have all the knowledge and wisdom and ideas.

Hill argues migrants have an obligation to integrate into the wider Australian community but says it’s a two-way street and that the role of “settlement services” in enabling and helping people to do so can be revamped.

His approach chimes with that of Andrew Jakubowicz, emeritus professor of sociology at UTS and an expert on multiculturalism, in a just published article, After Bondi: Social Cohesion, Multiculturalism and Nation-Building in Australia, for the German left-wing think tank, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

Jakubowicz writes: “We now require not so much a refinement of existing policies but a reconceptualisation of the institutional infrastructure for social cohesion through the lens of resilience”.

He urges a dedicated national body “to coordinate the settlement, multicultural and intercultural dimensions of social resilience”.

Its task would be “to create the conditions for expanding intercultural engagement, civic participation across and between ethnic and religious communities and the necessary and sustained educational efforts that will underpin them”.

The message from both Hill and Jakubowicz is clear. To have multiculturalism flourish, we need “interculturalism” to be elevated to the centre of policy.

As a footnote, Jakubowicz also has a warning about “social cohesion”, which he says is a concept that can be a constraint rather than an aspiration.

“Genuine social cohesion is not enforced uniformity,” he writes on his blog. “It is the outcome of a society where people from different backgrounds genuinely feel they belong – where the scriptwriters’ table has enough chairs.”

A point the royal commission will presumably not miss.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Six months on from Australia’s under-16s social media ban taking effect, the early verdict from headlines and children themselves has been blunt: it isn’t working.

A new study published today in the British Medical Journal appears to add even more weight to this judgement.

Led by University of Newcastle public health researcher Courtney Barnes, the study found very little evidence that kids had stopped accessing restricted social media platforms such as TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram.

But the question “are children evading social media age checks?” might be the wrong one to ask when considering the long-term success of Australia’s world-first experiment.

Isolating the effect of the ban

The team behind the new study followed 408 adolescents aged 12–16, surveying them just before the law took effect in December 2025 and again three months later. They compared teenagers just under the age cutoff with those just over it to isolate the law’s effect.

They found more than 85% of under-16s were still using restricted platforms at follow-up, mostly through their own accounts.

Two thirds had encountered age verification, but the most common form was simply being asked to state their age. A minority used fake accounts or private browsing to access social media. But VPN use to evade the ban was rare.

When the researchers checked whether under-16s used social media any less than the just-over-16s who were free to keep their accounts, they found no meaningful gap at the age cutoff.

The researchers were transparent about the study’s limitations. The analysis was underpowered (which means the study may not have had enough participants to detect an effect if one existed). The sample sizes either side of the cutoff were also small.

Nevertheless, these results square with recent research from the eSafety Commissioner that showed roughly 7 in 10 children kept their accounts after the law came into effect.

So, case closed, right? The ban is a failure? Not quite.

An unrealistic pipe dream

It was an unrealistic pipe dream that the ban would stop all of today’s under-16s from using social media overnight. All online technology comes with inherent capacities to be exploited or its features circumvented.

Instead, the ban enables the government to put pressure on social media companies to comply with their directives – to restrain and contain them with greater power than existed before.

The ban should be considered over a longer timeframe. Its logic is more aligned with another form of public health law: the generational approach now being applied to tobacco control.

Britain’s Tobacco and Vapes Act, which received royal assent in April 2026, bars anyone born on or after January 1 2009 from ever being sold tobacco.

The aim is not to make today’s smokers quit but to raise a generation for whom smoking never becomes normal. Australia’s social media law makes a similar bet: that if access is delayed long enough, social media might lose its grip on childhood the way cigarettes slowly did.

That is the measure that matters, and it’s a far slower and less certain test than counting how many teens still have Instagram six months after the ban took effect.

A benighted idea for future generations

Granted, there’s a catch to this framing.

Tobacco use has been denormalised with a public health approach for decades, and its supply has been squeezed from multiple directions: higher prices, plain packaging, advertising bans.

It’s hard to put pressure on social media use in the same way. Effectively, social media is “free”, practically infinite, and engineered to maximise engagement.

Shifting a generation’s social media norms this way only works if the pressure on platforms is relentless and sustained for years, not abandoned the moment the first headlines call it a failure.

My research into social media use and risk-taking found the same difficulties: norms are sticky. Social media rewards risky content and changes what is deemed as normal or acceptable. Changing norms like these overnight is unlikely.

But viewed in the long term, or even generationally, we can see how social media use for children may become a benighted idea for future generations.

Effects not clear for a decade

Naturally, laws that “ban” things often have unintended or even detrimental consequences. When mandatory bicycle helmet laws were introduced in Australia in the early 1990s, one result was that some people simply cycled less.

The new study in the British Medical Journal reflects this, with small numbers of young people turning to fake accounts, private browsing or messaging apps. Some may drift to less visible corners of the internet that are harder to watch than the mainstream platforms.

We shouldn’t take this to mean the ban is a failure. It means we are judging it on a timeline that does not fit its design.

The researchers make the point themselves: the greatest opportunity may lie with children under eight who have not yet started using social media, rather than teenagers whose habits are already set, whose norms are to use social media.

By their estimate, the full effects may not be clear for a decade.

Australia has volunteered to be the world’s test case, with other countries now following. To do the social media age restrictions justice, we should test the right thing.

Samuel Cornell, Honorary Research Fellow in Public Health, The University of Queensland

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

A former Australian resident living in Iraq directed the attack on Melbourne Adass Israel Synagogue in December 2024, the head of ASIO Mike Burgess has revealed.

Burgess said Iran, which was behind the attack, recruited the man through a “complex web of Iraqi-based militia groups”.

“Valuing his high wealth and criminal connections, the IRGC (The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) protected him and supported his illegal enterprises.

"That changed dramatically after ASIO publicly named Iran’s involvement in the arsons.

"This person’s Iranian backers lost their enthusiasm, and after further pressure from Australian and local law enforcement, they threw him in prison.”

Burgess gave the details while delivering his Annual Threat Assessment speech on Wednesday evening. He also said an Iran-based Australian citizen orchestrated the firebombing of the Lewis Continental Kitchen in Bondi in October 2024, which was the “the first major attack in the summer of antisemitism”.

“This person is a senior agent of the IRGC Qods Force, running its networks around the world.

"We know more about him than he realises, including the name of his superior in Iran and the department he works for. Department eleven-thousand, a covert unit within the IRGC Qods Force, is responsible for coordinating operations in the West.”

Burgess said he couldn’t name the individuals because of the need to protect continuing investigations and related prosecutions.

“But I want them to understand this: we know who you are, we know what you’ve done and we know who you work for.”

On antisemitism generally, Burgess said it was often seen through a narrow lens. But it could come from “diverse sources simultaneously, challenging traditional definitions, assumptions, and approaches”.

Sadly, and illogically, hatred of Jews is one thing virtually all the violent extremist cohorts have in common. Neo-Nazis are antisemitic. Islamic extremism is antisemitic.

Issue-motivated extremists can be antisemitic, particularly when they subscribe to conspiracy theories and stereotypes about the Jewish community.

Nation states can be antisemitic, as we saw with the arson attacks against the Jewish communities in Melbourne and Sydney perpetrated by criminals directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Anarchists and revolutionary groups can be antisemitic.

He said Australian companies seen to have links to Israel were being targeted with “repeated acts of vandalism and arson by far-left activists”.

“My point is that violent antisemitism is not a single, or simple, intelligence problem.”

The firebombing of a synagogue “can simultaneously be criminal arson, foreign interference, the promotion of communal violence and politically motivated violence”.

“And when Iran directs the arson, it’s an act of state-sponsored terrorism.”

Burgess once again stressed the degrading of Australian’s security environment. “Great power competition is driving an insatiable appetite for strategic advantage. As a result, espionage and foreign interference are at extreme levels, while preparation for sabotage is growing in scale and sophistication.”

“At the same time, politically motivated violence – which incorporates terrorism – remains an acute concern.”

Burgess said the degrading security environment was marked by “concurrent, cascading, and compounding threats” which could be categorised as “threats to life” and “threats to our way of life”.

In a speech filled, as usual, with case studies, Burgess related the story of a person subjected to “an unrelenting campaign of intimidation” by a foreign regime that for a decade had demanded he return to his place of birth to address unspecified corruption investigations.

The harassment included detaining the man’s relatives living overseas, interrogating them and subjecting them to travel bans.

“After receiving a desperate plea from one of the detained relatives, a family member based in Australia tried to sort things out.The family member flew to the foreign country to meet the regime’s. They interrogated the traveller for hours, and bluntly stated the individual would only be allowed to return to Australia after agreeing to maintain phone contact with the regime and file reports on the target of the harassment.”

Burgess said ASIO knew of five regimes that targeted Australians with harassment, with one country particularly active.

“In 2023 alone, that country coerced at least eight individuals to leave Australia for the place of their birth. Five were Australian citizens or permanent residents. Three never returned.”

Burgess said Australia’s defence captivities, especially AUKUS, were priority targets for foreign intelligence services.

“A spy from a foreign intelligence service approached an Australian security clearance holder online, pretending to be from a consulting company.

"The spy paid the official to write two reports on Australia’s relationship with our Pacific neighbours, and then, thinking he’d been hooked, offered money for inside information on AUKUS. The foreign intelligence service wanted insights on the progress of Pillar 1, the technologies of Pillar 2, the amount of money being invested, Australia’s geo-strategic ambitions, relations between the three AUKUS governments and the likely trajectory of Australian public opinion.

"I’m pleased to report the clearance holder became suspicious and reported the contact.”

Burgess also said nation-state hackers had compromised the network of a critical Australian infrastructure provider. They were apparently preparing for sabotage, mapping out the network so it could be later crippled.

“Cyber sabotage is an evolving threat, and I have established dedicated teams to counter it. As ASIO’s understanding grows, so does our level of concern.

"The scale of this activity – led by one nation state in particular – is difficult to overstate. You’d be surprised how extensive our warrant coverage is. We struggle to find a single country in our region that has not been compromised by this state’s cyber apparatus.”

He said critical infrastructure in energy and communication as well as that supporting the military were “top targets”.

“In this case, a state-sponsored group didn’t just achieve access to the Australian critical infrastructure provider, it successfully acquired credentials – log in details and passwords – for active users of the networks, including the IT professionals guarding it.”

Burgess struck a defensive note when talking about ASIO’s counter terrorism activity in recent times, which can be read as a response to criticism that the organisation had not given counter terrorism sufficient priority.

“Even when surging espionage and foreign interference demanded more attention, countering terrorism remained a priority – as I stated publicly in ASIO’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment.

"We increased CT resourcing when we raised the threat level in 2024 and it continued to grow in the months before Bondi. Resourcing followed the threat.

"The number of ASIO officers working on our counter-terrorism mission in 2025 was almost double the number from 2005.

"That reflects a bigger ASIO but also an on-going commitment to leave no known serious threat untreated.”

But he said in the new terrorism environment, even a “vast army” of ASIO officers might not be enough “to find an individual who’s been radicalised online and uses encrypted communications”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

He once called one of my relatives and said “when a chicken stops laying eggs, people slaughter it and eat it”. Because I had not been able to become pregnant, he basically said I too should be slaughtered.

When Zakira* made this comment during an interview for my PhD research, I was shocked.

“Does this relative of yours live in Australia?” I asked.

“Yes, she is in Australia,” Zakira said. “And no, if you are going to ask me whether she reported it to the police, she didn’t. Neither did I.”

Zakira isn’t alone. My research on migrant women’s experiences of abuse revealed people around these women were aware of threats, yet nobody contacted police.

A consistent pattern

My research focused on spousal financial abuse, but it soon became clear it was deeply entangled with emotional, physical, and sexual violence. These overlapping forms of violence help enforce fear, dependence, and silence.

Across these stories, a pattern emerged: a deep reluctance to contact the police.

One participant told me she didn’t even know how to call police.

I had no idea people in Australia call police if anyone is beaten. I thought it is like the way we do in Bangladesh; it is the family who mitigate the problem. That’s why I kept complaining to my in-laws each time I was beaten.

Another said:

I wasn’t sure they would help me because I am Muslim, and they are not.

Zakira told me:

In Bangladesh […] f the police get involved in family matters, the whole society shames that family. In Australia, I had no idea what the police would do if I called them. What if my husband beat me more once the police were gone? What if the police blamed me instead? […] And this was a matter between a husband and wife, what would the police do?

After particularly violent incidents, Zakira would sometimes walk to the local police station and stand outside, trying to gather the courage to go in. But, each time, she turned and went home.

This was partly because shortly after arriving in Australia, her husband and one of his friends

told me the police strip-search the complainer if they suspect anything. I did not want that. I did not want to be naked in front of the police.

Police not always seen as a source of safety

Not all women in my research remained silent.

Beena told me:

I called police on the second time because I did not want to end up like my mother. From my childhood I have seen my father hit my mother on whatever occasion he wishes to. If me or my sibling tried to save my mother, he would beat us too […] I didn’t want my own family to become the same.

Most, however, did not see the police as a source of safety.

Coming from a post-colonial country where the policing system was originally designed to serve the British Empire rather than protect ordinary people, many carried a deep-seated fear and mistrust of law enforcement. This was shaped by experiences of policing culture in Bangladesh, where abuse of power and impunity are common.

As Safia said:

In Bangladesh, there’s a saying: if a tiger attacks you, you suffer 18 wounds; but if the police get involved, you suffer 36!

She added:

I thought if I call police they will come and take my husband to jail straight away […] where will I go with my children? I had no money, no support.

Several women described being repeatedly warned by their husbands that involving police would lead to deportation or removal of the children.

Another woman, Roji, worried that because her husband spoke fluent English and she didn’t, he would be able to convince the police while she would struggle to even understand what was being said.

Stigma and shame

Migrant women often face enormous emotional, financial, social, and cultural barriers even after contacting police. Many described becoming immediately overwhelmed by guilt and uncertainty after seeking help.

Under pressure from family and community members, and frightened by the prospect of navigating Australia’s legal and welfare systems alone, many withdrew complaints.

Women described how involving police often leads to gossip and stigma.

Humaira was on the verge of calling triple zero when she thought of another family who’d involved police:

Since people saw police coming to their house, the other families don’t allow their children to play with the children of that particular family […] I hung up immediately.

Dependency built into the system

Migration is not automatically liberating for women. In many cases, migrant women face new vulnerabilities, such as isolation and financial dependency on their spouse, after arriving in Australia.

My research raises an uncomfortable question: what if the systems meant to protect migrant women are often unable to hear them properly in the first place?

Most women who actually sought help described feeling lost trying to navigate the system. Many described feeling rushed interacting with authorities, unfamiliar legal language, and the absence of culturally sensitive communication.

After police attended an incident at Safia’s home and took her husband to the police station, she was asked whether she wanted to “press charges”. But no one explained what that meant, or what the possible consequences could be.

Another woman, Ayesha, said of her experience:

The police came and gave an AVO against him. I even did not know what AVO means.

Mala, who endured prolonged physical, sexual and psychological abuse, eventually contacted police about her experiences. But when police mentioned an AVO,

That was the first time I heard the word AVO. Later that day, the police called me back and informed me that my husband didn’t acknowledge any accusation. I had no idea what that means legally. It was very difficult for me to understand what the police were telling me.

Many participants described entering legal processes without even the most basic understanding of Australian laws, police procedures, or support services.

However, not all participants experienced police interactions negatively. Faiza described how her ex-husband falsely accused her of being violent towards him after calling the police, tearing his own shirt, and banging his forehead against a wall. Arrested and taken to the police station, she felt bewildered. But a female police officer calmly guided her through the process.

One officer offered her a sandwich and juice to break her Ramadan fast. Faiza recalled:

As I was crying, the officer told me, “This is not the end of the world, don’t worry”. I felt like those were the most comforting words I had ever heard in my life.

It’s also important to recognise many migrant women hesitate to disclose abuse because they fear feeding racist stereotypes.

But rejecting racism shouldn’t mean ignoring women’s suffering.

If we fail to confront this violence and the structural failures surrounding it, many migrant women face the prospect of years trying to survive systems that never fully saw or understood them.

*All names have been changed to protect identities.

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

Farjana Mahbuba, PhD Researcher, Australian Catholic University

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

The Dutch government is considering making it illegal to use children under 16 in paid social media content. The government argues such online content featuring children – designed to sell goods to child consumers – is basically involving them in child labour.

With Australia’s under-16s social media ban in place and other countries – most recently the United Kingdom – following suit, would this be the next logical step to protect children?

The reach of child influencers

Child influencers are increasingly featured in family vlogs, toy unboxing videos, gaming streams and branded posts. One prominent example is Ryan Kaji, who began reviewing toys on YouTube at age four. By 2024, he had built “Ryan’s World” into a major commercial brand spanning toys, clothing, films, television content and sponsorships. The channel has more than 40 million subscribers, with estimated annual earnings of around US$35 million (A$51 million).

Research shows children often perceive influencers as more trustworthy and relatable than traditional advertisers. This in turn can limit their ability to recognise persuasive intent.

Influencer content integrates advertising into entertainment formats, blurring the line between play and promotion. Content created by paid influencers attracts, on average, nearly ten times as many likes per video as content that appears unpaid.

Influencer content can also go viral because large follower counts boost initial exposure, increasing the likelihood of cascades of shares and further uptake.

In this context, the proposed ban aims to prevent children from being used as a “revenue model” by parents or companies.

Dutch Minister for Work and Participation Thierry Aartsen argues that when children become central to monetised content, they risk losing their privacy and developing negative self-images. This is particularly so when their online presence is shaped by commercial pressures.

Unlike adult creators, children may have limited capacity to consent to their participation. They also have little control over how their images are used, and no guarantee of fair compensation.

For this reason, the Dutch government is framing the issue as one of child labour rather than simply media participation. It seeks to prevent children under 16 from appearing in revenue-generating content. In this way, it hopes to curb a “kidfluencer” economy that lacks adequate protections for privacy, consent and fair compensation.

A ‘grey zone’ in child labour laws

The Dutch government’s decision highlights Australia’s regulatory gap. Australian laws do not adequately address the growing use of children as revenue sources by companies or their own parents.

In Australia, every state and territory has different rules that govern child employment. Most jurisdictions restrict paid work for children under 13 or 15. Regulations also vary in terms of the duration of work allowed for children, the types of work they can undertake, and the responsibilities placed on employers.

In New South Wales, employers must obtain authorisation from the Office of the Children’s Guardian to engage children for entertainment, performance, filming or still photography if the child is under 15. For modelling, that applied if the child is under 16.

A condition of being granted authority is the employer’s compliance with the relevant legislation and code of practice. Employers must also follow strict rules, including limits on working hours, ensuring proper supervision, providing rest breaks, and protecting the child from harm.

Australia’s current framework protects children employed through agencies, which are responsible for permits and compliance with rules governing hours, supervision and workplace safety.

However, when parents create content featuring their children for paid partnerships, it becomes unclear whether the child is an employee or simply participating in everyday family activity being filmed.

This creates a “grey area” where legal protections may not automatically extend to child influencers. This suggests new or updated legislation is needed to better protect child influencers.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has acknowledged the growing role of children in the influencer economy. It has raised concerns about the privacy risks, online harassment and lack of labour protections faced by “kidfluencers” appearing in commercial content.

New laws for a new world?

As social media becomes increasingly commercialised, governments need to consider whether existing laws are keeping pace with new forms of work.

Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s came into effect on December 10 2025. These new laws aim to protect young people from addictive platform features and harmful content.

However, the ban is already proving difficult to enforce, with more than 60% of children still using social media. UNICEF Australia argues improving online safety, rather than delaying access, is a more effective approach.

What Australia could do instead of a ban

Against this backdrop, instead of adopting a blanket ban, Australia could extend child labour protections to digital environments. This could be done by classifying children’s participation in monetised content as a form of digital labour under the child employment code of practice.

Such a change would require parents and talent agencies producing monetised child-centred content to comply with government conditions on the duration and type of work children can undertake.

The ACCC and Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) could also require social media platforms to clearly disclose sponsored content involving minors and provide greater transparency around such content.

Finally, the eSafety commissioner should expand media literacy initiatives to equip parents and carers with the knowledge, skills and tools needed to make more informed decisions about children’s involvement in monetised, child-centred content.

Nipa Saha, Lecturer, Macquarie University

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

This week, Vegemite launched a new product specifically for children called Vegemite Kids that contains 50% less sodium (salt) than the traditional iconic spread.

Reactions have been divided. Some have called it “un-Australian”, said it would make kids less resilient, and called for Vegemite to be left alone. Others thought a lower-salt option was a good idea.

Vegemite is among Australian children’s most frequently eaten discretionary breakfast items. So let’s unpack whether halving the salt content in this new product makes a meaningful difference to children’s health.

Why care about sodium levels?

Sodium is an essential nutrient (meaning our bodies need some sodium to function normally). But Australians typically eat more than the recommended amount.

Eating too much sodium is associated with raised blood pressure, a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease (including heart attack and stroke).

This relationship begins early in life. Eating a lot of sodium is associated with higher blood pressure in children and adolescents.

Taste preferences also develop during childhood. For instance, infants who often eat salty foods are more likely to prefer salty food when older.

For these reasons, reducing sodium intake remains a public health priority in Australia and internationally.

How much is too much?

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports many Australian children consume substantially more sodium than recommended.

Importantly, sodium intake does not typically come from adding salt to meals (such as using a salt shaker). Rather, it is typically already in foods.

For example, bread contributes almost 15% of Australian children’s sodium intake. Next comes mixed cereal-based dishes (such as sandwiches and pizza) and processed meats (such as ham).

How much difference does Vegemite Kids make?

A 5 gram serve of regular Vegemite contains 165 milligrams of sodium. A 5g serve of Vegemite Kids contains 82mg, almost exactly 50%. The recommended serving sizes for the two versions are the same.

So if a child eats a 5g serve of Vegemite each day, switching to Vegemite Kids would reduce their sodium intake by about 83mg a day. For a child consuming around 2,000–2,500mg sodium a day, this equates to roughly a 3–4% reduction in total sodium intake.

However, some children prefer only a thin scraping of Vegemite on toast rather than a full 5g. So, if these children switched to Vegemite Kids, their reduction in overall sodium intake would be even smaller.

Even if every child in Australia switched to Vegemite Kids instead of Vegemite while maintaining their current intake, most of the sodium in their diet would still come from other foods, such as bread, processed meat or other processed foods.

The bigger story may be food reformulation

Food manufacturers are facing increasing pressure to improve the nutritional profile of packaged foods. This includes targets to reduce sodium content across a range of food categories.

These targets are voluntary rather than mandatory. But if there is insufficient industry response, these targets may become mandatory, as has been proposed for Health Star Ratings.

While reformulation often produces relatively small changes in nutrient intake at the individual level, those changes can accumulate across populations when adopted at scale.

From this perspective, Vegemite Kids is part of a broader trend in reducing sodium in familiar foods to support health and wellbeing, without requiring consumers to make major changes to their eating habits.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland

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

The central aim of any child protection system is in the name: protect children. But over the years, inquiries and media reports have shown fulfilling this goal has too often proved tragically elusive.

In response, governments across the country have poured more and more money into their child protection systems in the hope of getting better outcomes.

Our newly-published research shows total national spending has almost doubled over the decade, climbing from $5.4 billion in 2014–15 to $10.2 billion in 2023–24 (adjusted for inflation).

But we found this hasn’t been matched by changes in activity across systems, like increases in the rate of investigations for alleged maltreatment, or the number of children entering out-of-home care. Nor has it improved outcomes for children.

So if money alone isn’t the answer, what is? Here’s what the evidence shows would help.

A maze of moving parts

Protecting Australia’s children is not the job of a single system. It involves many overlapping systems – health, childcare, education, justice and policing, disability services, and other parts of the social welfare system – working together to prevent and respond to child abuse, neglect and exploitation.

In Australia, there is no national child protection system to bring these parts together. Each state and territory runs its own. They share the same guiding principles, such as acting in the best interests of the child. But how they operate in practice differs across the country.

The result is several systems made up of many moving parts that do not always work as a coordinated whole. And too often, prevention is left to the side, in favour of reacting to harm once it has already happened.

Recent inquiries in Queensland and Victoria show this fragmentation is not just inefficient, but may be causing more harm than good.

The concerns raised in the recent Queensland and Victorian inquiries about how we protect children are not new. They have been raised many times in recent history.

Queensland alone has had four inquiries in the past 30 years (1999, 2004, 2012–13 and 2025–26), while Victoria has had three (2012, 2024, and 2026).

But as the presiding commissioner for the 2025–26 Queensland inquiry, Paul Anastassiou put it:

[…] the child protection system continues to fail children and the community in serious respects.

So, what are the problems?

1. Child protection systems don’t work as a whole

Statutory child protection services hold decision-making authority over when and how to intervene in a child’s life, and ultimately, whether a child needs to be removed from their parent(s) to keep them safe.

But it doesn’t control the conditions that create harm in the first place. Those sit across other systems.

For example, poverty and housing instability are linked to harm, yet responsibility for addressing these conditions lies within housing and income support systems, not child protection.

Similarly, other causes of harm such as family violence, mental illness, and substance use are addressed through justice, health, and alcohol and other drug systems.

This means responsibility for child safety is distributed across many systems. Accountability, however, is not.

Each system remains accountable for its own functions, rather than for whether children are kept safe, stable and supported. No single system is accountable for whether the child’s best interests are upheld across their life course.

This has real consequences for statutory child protection decision-making. Information about children and families sits across multiple systems, and those systems do not always communicate. So, child safety decisions are often made with incomplete, fragmented or selectively available information.

At the same time, decisions are made under pressure and often rely on adult’s views without meaningful consultation of children and young people about their own safety, or what would help.

Together, this creates child protection systems where high-stakes decisions are made on shaky foundations.

2. Child protection systems act too late and can cause harm

Systems remain overwhelmingly reactive, responding only after harm has happened, rather than preventing it in the first place.

In more than 50% of cases, children and families in contact with systems have already been subject to a child protection investigation.

The Victorian inquiry revealed that once in contact with statutory child protection, children aged 15–17 years old can expect to be re-reported almost seven times.

While this is not a new problem, it is one that must be solved.

Worse still, child protection systems themselves can cause harm. Children might experience multiple placements, uprooting relational and environmental stability, as well as significant delays in receiving health and medical care.

The most recent Queensland inquiry also highlighted children placed in residential care in particular experience higher rates of trauma, unmet mental health needs, self-harm and suicide attempts.

The commission rightly recognised the state’s heavy reliance on residential care as one of its biggest failures.

3. Over-prioritising crisis responses

Both the Queensland and Victorian inquiries found most resources are spent on responding to crises rather than on early intervention.

Our research found while overall spending was increasing, out-of-home care saw most of the funding boost. Between 2014–15 and 2023–24, the proportion of all spending that was on activities associated with out-of-home care increased from 58.4% to 63.6%.

Meanwhile, investment in intensive family support reduced from 8.2% to 6.2% of the overall spend.

What needs to be done?

Together, findings from recent inquiries and our own research show child protection systems across Australia are not consistently delivering on their core aim: acting in the best interests of the child.

While state-level statutory child protection reform is welcome, addressing this will require federal leadership.

Australia needs a national child maltreatment prevention agenda with sustained investment in prevention and early support. It could be overseen by the Department of Social Services, whose role is to improve the economic and social wellbeing of individuals, families and vulnerable members of Australian communities.

Alternatively, because child maltreatment is a significant public health issue, it could also be assigned to the Australian Centre for Disease Control: a national agency established to strengthen Australia’s prevention, preparedness and response to public health threats.

There also needs to be shared accountability across all systems that should be involved in supporting children’s safety.

Finally, genuine partnership with First Nations organisations is needed to help Indigenous children, who are over-represented in child protection systems.

Until these systems are designed to work together, they will continue to fail to deliver what children need most: safety, stability and support.

Claudia Bull, Postdoctoral research fellow, Deakin University and Daryl Higgins, Professor & Director, Institute of Child Protection Studies, Australian Catholic University

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

July 1 ushers in a new financial year – and a raft of changes that will affect both workers and businesses.

From changes in superannuation payments and parental leave to an above-inflation increase in the minimum wage, here’s what you need to know.

Modest tax cuts are coming

From July 1, the current lowest income tax rate, which applies to income from A$18,201 to $45,000, will be reduced from 16% to 15%.

So a person earning $45,000 or more will save $268 a year.

New ‘instant’ $1,000 tax deduction

If you’re someone who hates keeping track of receipts, there’s good news.

While it still has to pass parliament, the federal government has proposed an “instant” $1,000 work-related tax deduction to start this financial year. That’s higher than the little-known $300 limit on receipt-free work deductions available already.

It’s forecast to leave about 6.2 million Australians better off than now.

But be warned: if you’re among the majority of Australians who claim more than $1,000 in work expenses, you’ll be better off still collecting those receipts and claiming the way you have before.

National minimum wage increase

Around 2.8 million of Australia’s lowest-paid workers will get a 4.75% pay rise from July 1. The very lowest-paid workers – about 100,000 people on entry-level and minimum pay – get a bigger 5.97% pay bump.

The national minimum wage will rise from $24.95 an hour to $26.44, or up from $948 a week to $1,004.90 per week.

Yet even after the new rises, Australia’s lowest-paid employees will still have less buying power at the shops than they did five years ago.

Payday super

From July 1, all Australian businesses need to pay their employees’ superannuation on the same day as they pay salaries. It’s expected to leave ordinary workers thousands of dollars better off in the long term, while guarding against a persistent problem of super being underpaid.

If you’re an employer worried about meeting the July 1 deadline, you can find more resources here.

Parental leave pay changes

The length of paid parental leave is increasing slightly, by ten days, to a total of 26 weeks from July 1, and the payment will increase to $1,004.70 per week.

The government says this will provide families with more financial support and parents will still need to meet an income test and work test.

There’s more information for employers on how the scheme works here.

Instant asset write-off extended

For small businesses, an instant writeoff for assets costing less than A$20,000 will be extended permanently from July 1. This applies to small businesses with annual turnover of less than $10 million.

SMS register to fight scams

For years, scammers have used a simple trick to lure people into clicking links they shouldn’t.

You get a message from “AusGov” and assume it’s from the Australian government. In fact, that’s a fake “sender ID” – the identity of who’s sending a text – close enough to the real “myGov” that it has fooled people.

From July 1, those scam text messages should show up on your phone under a single, “unverified” message thread.

While it’s a welcome move, it is expected to catch some businesses and community groups off-guard. If they haven’t registered their legitimate sender ID by July 1, their messages risk ending up in that “unverified” scam thread too.

Supermarket price-gouging law

From July 1, it will be harder for our two largest supermarkets – Coles and Woolworths – to charge “excessive prices”. A new law has been brought in to increase scrutiny on their pricing practices, following similar rules in the European Union.

Penalties will apply for any breach, although “excessive pricing” may be difficult to prove.

Anti-money laundering rules widened

Updated laws covering anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing (known as “AML/CTF”) will apply to more businesses from July 1.

The rules will now apply to real estate professionals, lawyers, accountants and conveyancers and some other businesses. These services will need to register with the regulator, AUSTRAC, and meet certain requirements, such as checking the identity of customers and reporting certain transactions.

What’s not changing from July 1

• Changes proposed in the May federal budget to negative gearing and the 50% capital gains tax discount are not yet law. They are currently being debated in parliament and are due to begin on July 1 2027.

• A new minimum tax on discretionary trusts, also flagged in the budget, is not due to start till July 1 2028. These types of trusts are typically used for income splitting, so a high income earner pays a lower rate of tax.

• The Working Australians Tax Offset announced in the May budget provides an additional tax offset of $250 each year. But this only starts from July 2027.

For more changes coming in from July 1, 2026 – including on business and company fees – check the federal government’s Business website.

Liz Minchin, Executive Editor + Business Editor, The Conversation and Victoria Thieberger, Business and Economics Editor, The Conversation

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

The Greens have secured an eight-week extension of the Senate inquiry into the government’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) legislation – but declared they will vote against it regardless.

The government had little choice but to agree to the extension, which will take several hundred million off its projected savings.

It needed the Greens’ support to pass its tax package before parliament rises for its winter recess, an agreement it has now secured. Anyway, if it had held out against the longer inquiry, the Greens and opposition would have had the numbers to vote for it in the Senate.

The Greens said extending the inquiry until August 14 “would grant more time to build pressure on both Labor and the Liberals to withdraw their support for the bill entirely”.

But they stressed in a statement: “Regardless of amendments, the Greens will oppose the NDIS bill if it comes to a vote”.

The Greens noted they had already secured several amendments, including limiting ministerial powers.

The government will press on with the legislation, but the delay raises issues for it on two fronts.

It complicates the start of implementing the reforms. Minister for the NDIS Mark Butler said the delay in passing the legislation would cost “a few hundred million dollars”. The original timetable for passage has gone from this fortnight to August, which will hold up some changes. But he said the big changes did not start until October 1.

The delay also gives added time and exposure for critics of the changes to air stories of how people will be potentially disadvantaged.

The cuts to the NDIS are the biggest area of savings in the budget. The budget projects that over the forward estimates, spending will grow about an average of 2% every year as the government resets many of the scheme’s design features, before returning to 5% growth from 2030. Its present spending growth rate is about 10%.

Butler said a six-month extension, which the Coalition wanted, “would cost the budget billions of dollars, but would also delay our ability to get those cost blowouts under control, to clear up eligibility rules, and to crack down on the fraud and the integrity issues that the community knows are there with the NDIS”.

He said the government would use the extra time to provide reassurances about the NDIS reforms.

Labor is looking to the Coalition to ultimately provide the Senate numbers to pass the legislation.

On the tax package, the Greens won an amendment to prevent people purchasing investment residential properties through self-managed superannuation funds to dodge the capital gains tax increase. The Greens said this would stop “wealthy property investors exploiting a loophole”.

Last week the government announced several changes to the controversial tax reform package, after sustained attacks from business and other critics.

In relation to the latest change, the government said superannuation funds were generally banned from borrowing money to invest, with the exception of “limited recourse borrowing arrangements ”(LRBAs) used by self-managed superannuation funds.

These arrangements will be banned for residential property in the future, although current arrangements will stand.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said multiple inquiries had raised concerns about the current arrangements, including under the Coalition government. The arrangements make up under 1% of total residential property borrowing.

The change is a saving to the budget of $50 million over the forward estimates.

Overall, however, the government has been spending substantial extra money since the budget. Earlier changes to the tax package cost $475 million over the forward estimates, while the partial extension of fuel excise relief, announced at the weekend, will cost $400 million.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Twenty years ago, 16-year-old Taylor Swift released her debut single, Tim McGraw. To understand everything that has come since – the confessional genius, the brand strategy, the carefully constructed persona – this three-minute-and-fifty-two-second country ballad is a good place to start.

As we argue in our edited collection Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital & Critique, Swift is a cultural phenomenon worthy of critical attention – a lens through which we can examine culture and power in contemporary life.

The making of a country superstar

In 2004, 14-year-old Swift and her family relocated from Pennsylvania to Nashville, Tennessee, so she could pursue her dream of country stardom.

During her recent induction as the youngest woman into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Swift said:

it couldn’t have been easy to just pick up and move our entire family … But after it became obvious that this was not even remotely a temporary phase their tween daughter was going through, they uprooted their entire lives to move me to music city.

Swift became the first artist signed to Big Machine Records, an independent label founded by Scott Borchetta, who signed Swift after seeing her perform at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe.

Shortly after, her stockbroker father invested about US$500,000 into the label in 2006, becoming a shareholder.

Swift went to work on her first album, Taylor Swift (2006), with Tim McGraw as the lead single.

Confessional songwriting

Swift has said that when she wrote Tim McGraw, she was dating a boy who was leaving for college. So instead of a breakup song, she wrote a pre-breakup song about her desire to be remembered by her future ex-lover.

The song’s emotional logic is anticipatory grief. This is remarkably mature lyrical instinct; she was already aware of the long shadow cast by first love. She was also taking control of the narrative of her own life through lyrics.

What makes the song even more significant is the form. Swift writes from a confessional “I” that collapses the line between songwriter and subject.

As one of our book chapters (by Faichney) explains, confessional songwriting conveys raw emotion and authenticity through its association with the autobiographical. This has become emblematic of Swift’s oeuvre; the most intimate parts of her life have been immortalised in song.

Tim McGraw exemplifies much of Swift’s early work: songs that nostalgically capture the experience of being young and in love.

It was no accident that this connection felt so immediate and personal. Swift was cultivating it directly through MySpace blogs and personal fan responses. This laid the groundwork for what became one of the most sophisticated parasocial relationships in pop music history.

Borrowed capital: the original brand strategy

It may seem an audacious move for an unknown teenager to borrow the name of country’s number one star, Tim McGraw, as her song title. It was also a clever strategy.

Using the name of an artist with crossover mainstream success on a debut release immediately communicated country music legibility. This gambit of adopted cultural credibility worked.

Swift went on to open for McGraw and Faith Hill on tour. Her single peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, and reached number 40 on the Hot 100 – foreshadowing her future success.

This was the first iteration of a repeated pattern in Swift’s career, in which she leverages association as a form of cultural and ideological capital.

As one of us (Whatman) argues in our collection, this approach is also visible in Swift’s relationship with feminism and whiteness.

Her celebrity “girl squad” of the 1989 era – including publicly “feminist” figures such as Mariska Hargitay and Lena Dunham – was borrowed capital of a different kind: a strategically timed visual embodiment of Swift’s public declaration of feminism.

In the Bad Blood music video and on tour, female solidarity is performed as a spectacle. The girl gang didn’t simply express “feminist” politics; it constructed them, producing a palatable, marketable, and overwhelmingly white feminism.

The limits of this strategy became visible in 2023, when Swift collaborated with rapper Ice Spice – the first Black woman to feature on one of her tracks – after she was publicly criticised for her silence on then-boyfriend Matty Healy’s racist comments about the rapper.

The template of the ‘all-American girl’

Tim McGraw also introduced the persona Swift would maintain: that of the relatable “all-American girl”, with her boots, guitar, and wholesome girl-next-door energy. Her beauty and talent might be intimidating, were it not for her approachable awkwardness and down-to-earth sincerity.

Swift had only been in Nashville for two years, yet recorded a song soaked in the iconography of a rural American girlhood she was still, in real terms, auditioning for. The song conjures the image of a country sweetheart, referencing Chevy trucks, sun-soaked fields and eyes like the “Georgia stars”.

While she has long since shed the Southern twang and cowboy boots, this persona has proven durable. It has been updated to something more urban and self-aware: the billionaire auteur who is somehow still the girl next door.

Importantly, this persona has never been neutral; it encodes whiteness and class privilege as an unmarked default. It is a form of girlhood capacious enough to be country or pop, apolitical or activist, and bestie or billionaire, precisely because whiteness and class privilege operate as its invisible foundation.

Swift’s extraordinary success speaks not only to her talent and work ethic, but to the structural conditions that determine whose version of American femininity gets to count.

Twenty years on

Tim McGraw hit the airwaves like a comet. It launched a pop ingenue who would become the most “relatable billionaire in the world” – a blueprint that every debut pop artist has since tried to follow.

Although she once borrowed his name and cultural capital, these days when people think of Tim McGraw, they almost certainly think of Taylor Swift.

Emma Whatman, Senior Tutor in Media and Communications, The University of Melbourne and Eloise Faichney, Lecturer in Media and Communications, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

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

Most people suspect they own too many clothes, but they aren’t sure exactly what the “right amount” is. Recent wardrobe studies, in which researchers literally peek inside peoples’ closets, show the scale of the problem is far greater than most of us imagine.

Sixty years ago, the average person owned about 40 garments.

Today, that number has more than quadrupled, with a recent study revealing these numbers continue to trend upwards. The typical wardrobe now contains an average of 199 major pieces. Even more striking: 25%–50% of these items are languishing in the back of drawers and rails.

Our hidden clothing footprint

Research tells us this is not just a clutter issue — it’s a carbon one. Every garment carries a sizeable environmental footprint long before it reaches a hanger, including from fibre production, spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting, sewing, packaging and global transport.

A jacket that ends up as fashion waste is more than a label and price tag. It’s the sum of all the resources and emissions that brought it into being.

At the same time, donating excess garments to charities is rarely a solution.

Before you channel your inner Marie Kondo and bag up half your wardrobe, it’s worth knowing that most charities are overwhelmed, and only a small fraction of donated clothing is resold. The rest often ends up in landfill or exported overseas, shifting the problem, rather than solving it.

The real issue isn’t simply how much we buy, but how little we wear what we already own.

Wear counts change everything

One of the clearest findings emerging from sustainability research is that the environmental impact of a garment often depends on how many times it’s worn. In a sense, every additional wear helps “offset” the garment’s carbon footprint.

The European Union has calculated the minimum number of wears needed for different clothing types:

• shirts and blouses: 40 wears

• T shirts: 45 wears

• pants, shorts, dresses, skirts, jumpsuits, leggings: 70 wears

• jumpers, cardigans, hoodies: 85 wears

• jackets and coats: 100 wears.

For many people, these numbers may be far higher than expected – and they shift the sustainability conversation from “buying better” to “wearing more”.

The wardrobe equation

My own recent research has gone further by offering a simple mathematical model to calculate how long it takes to reach these minimum wear counts. The formula is straightforward: wearing frequency × wardrobe volume. The results are eye opening.

Take dresses. The average participant in the study owned 23. So if they wore a dress once a week, it would take nearly 31 years to wear each one 70 times. If they wear dresses five times a week, the timeline drops to six and a half years.

The maths makes the issue clear: there is no universal “right” number of clothes. A sustainable wardrobe depends entirely on how often a person wears what they own, which is influenced by factors such as seasonality, climate, lifestyle, laundry habits and personal style.

The maths also becomes more complicated when you look at the entire wardrobe, rather than a single garment type.

Why a tailored approach is needed

Because of this complexity, it’s difficult to declare a fixed number of garments that constitutes a sustainable wardrobe.

As such, the next phase of my project is the development of an interactive wardrobe calculator – a tool designed to help individuals understand their own clothing use patterns and calculate a personalised sustainable wardrobe size.

The Paris 2030 Agreement to stay below 1.5°C of global warming recommends 85 garments or less would be a responsible target – although imposing strict limits does not take individual wearing patterns into account. People need a practical, tailored approach that reflects their real lives.

What the research makes clear is that sustainability isn’t about owning the perfect number of clothes, or purging half your wardrobe. It’s about understanding the maths behind what you own, how often you wear it, and how those choices shape your environmental impact.

Alicja Kuźmycz, Lecturer, Torrens University Australia

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

Have you ever been out at night and seen a streak of light blast across the sky and disappear? Ever wonder where that shooting star came from, or how it got to be in your sky?

As the director of the Peters Observatory at Hamilton College, I have seen many similar streaks across the sky, as I spend late nights at the observatory, and I am here to tell you that what you saw isn’t a star at all. You observed the end of a comet or asteroid’s 4.6-billion-year journey right before your eyes.

Remnants from the early solar system

Roughly 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was in its infancy. A vast ball of gas and dust that would become our solar system was accumulating matter in its center, forming what would eventually become our Sun. It was also condensing dust in smaller patches farther from the center that would merge into the first chunks of materials, called planetesimals.

Asteroids formed from planetesimals in the inner portions of the solar system, near the Sun. This location in the center of the solar system was warm, so the planetesimals were made mostly of the rocks and metals that could withstand the heat. The biggest of these chunks would congeal with others and form the terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The remaining planetesimals that did not form into the terrestrial planets are the asteroids of today, left to orbit the inner portion of the solar system.

Comets formed in the outer parts of the solar system, where it was cold enough that any water, or similar hydrogen-based compounds, took the form of ice. The planetesimals forming in this region were composed of not just rock and metal but these ices as well.

Some of the planetesimals became big enough, fast enough, that they had enough gravitational pull to hold onto large atmospheres composed of the very abundant early solar system gases, such as hydrogen and helium. These planetesimals became the Jovian planets of today: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, the planetesimals that did not form into the Jovian planets were left to travel through the solar system as comets.

Origin of meteors

Asteroids are still abundant in the inner solar system, so inevitably some will collide with Earth. When a chunk of rock enters Earth’s atmosphere, it’s traveling at dozens of miles per second. As it enters, it may create a thunderlike sonic boom in its wake. When it travels through the air faster than the speed of sound, the asteroid produces a shock wave, which can generate that boom.

During its journey through the atmosphere over tens of miles, the asteroid collides with air molecules, and the incredible temperatures and pressure usually vaporize it. That trail of vaporizing particles breaking off the asteroid causes a bright streak of light across the sky called a meteor, or colloquially a shooting star.

Comets, though typically found in the outer solar system, can also cause meteors, and even meteor showers. A few comets take long, elliptical paths through the inner solar system every year.

These objects, sometimes called “dirty snowballs” because they are made of dust and ices, tend to slowly melt as they get too close to the Sun, causing the comet to develop a tail of gas and debris left in its wake.

If the path of the comet intersects with Earth’s orbit, the Earth will collide with these debris fields in its yearly orbit around the Sun. As that debris enters the atmosphere, it vaporizes, causing numerous trails of light called meteor showers. Since this happens in the same part of our orbit every year, meteor showers are yearly events. If you find a dark sky, you can see dozens of meteors every hour during these annual meteor showers.

Finding meteorites

The meteors that are large enough to make it through the Earth’s atmosphere and crash into the surface are called meteorites. Meteorites tend to come from asteroids that were originally larger than a football field.

It can be difficult to identify meteorites, because they look just like Earth rocks. Typically, people recover meteorites in geologically unchanging regions, such as deserts or ice fields, where the meteorites stand out against the landscape.

They are often made of stone, nickel and iron and are likely magnetic. Many have irregular or pock-marked shapes, while others have a smooth crust from their time burning up in our atmosphere.

Meteorites are quite rare and important to the study of the early solar system. If you believe you’ve found one, you should verify your rock’s features fit those of a meteorite and then contact local geologists.

Next time you see a meteor in the night sky, remember that you are witnessing the end of its journey, spanning billions of years, as it burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Adam Lark, Associate Professor of Instruction for Physics, Hamilton College

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

If someone used a large truck to deliver one envelope across the street, what would your reaction be? You would probably say it worked, but it was wasteful. The envelope arrived, but the method made little sense.

In many ways, this mirrors how we often use artificial intelligence (AI) today.

We use powerful AI systems such as ChatGPT to write short messages, polish simple sentences, and answer questions we could handle ourselves with less intensive tools. The outcome is the same. But under the hood, the differences in processing, electricity, and water use are enormous.

One small request will not change the planet. But millions of small and unnecessary requests can add up over time. The question is not whether AI is good or bad. The better question is whether we are using the right amount of AI for the right task.

AI is becoming a utility

AI is quickly becoming an everyday utility, like electricity. But because it feels invisible, we can easily forget every use has a cost.

We know not to leave lights on all day. We also know not to run an air conditioner with windows open. We need a similar mindset for AI.

AI is often described as living in “the cloud”. This makes it sound light, clean, and almost magical. But the cloud is not really a cloud.

It is someone else’s computer. More precisely, it is a large network of data centres filled with servers, chips, cables and cooling systems.

When we interact with AI systems, they do not simply “know” the answers. They run calculations through large computer systems to generate a response. Training large AI models require enormous resources, but daily use adds up too.

Data centres can create significant carbon emissions. They also take up large tracts of land, put pressure on electricity grids and water supplies, and generate electronic waste. The International Energy Agency has projected global electricity use by data centres could roughly double to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030.

How to use AI more sensibly

This makes it important to consider how we can use AI more sensibly – and sustainably.

First, choose the right tool for the task. Not every job needs the most powerful AI model. Sometimes a smaller tool, search engine, calculator, or even your own brain is enough. Ask yourself: is AI adding any value here, or am I using it out of habit?

Second, write clearer prompts. Vague questions often lead to many follow-up prompts. A clear first request can reduce this back and forth. It is like giving a taxi driver the correct address before the trip starts instead of constantly correcting the route along the way.

Third, ask only for what you need. If you need a short list, do not ask for a long report. More words usually mean more computing.

Fourth, be more careful with images, audio, video and other media files. These typically require more computing power than texts.

The role of organisations and governments

Large organisations have an even bigger responsibility. They should not add AI to every product just because it is fashionable. Before adopting AI, they should ask: what problem are we solving? Is AI really needed? If it is, can we use a smaller model?

Governments should also require large data centres to report electricity use, water use, emissions and electronic waste as part of planning approvals.

Australia has released guidelines for data centre developers, but they are voluntary, not law.

New data centres should be planned very carefully, especially in places with limited water or stressed grids. Sustainability labels, like energy ratings on appliances, could help users compare tools by efficiency.

These measures could make sustainability part of normal AI governance, not an afterthought. They could help ensure AI stops being the equivalent of the truck carrying one envelope across the street.

Seyedali Mirjalili, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Business and Hospitality, Torrens University Australia

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

Australia’s match against the United States was always going to be the toughest of the Socceroos’ three fixtures in their World Cup group, and that proved to be the case. The US has backed up its emphatic opening win against Paraguay with a 2–0 victory that assures the host nation’s passage into the tournament’s knockout phase.

Socceroos coach Tony Popovic’s ultra-defensive formation may have worked effectively against Turkey, but having revealed Australia’s approach, the US appeared tactically superior.

The Americans were not the Turks. The long passes into the centre and speculative shots from outside the box that characterised Turkey’s attack were absent here. Instead, the Americans played with greater composure and variety. Defensively they employed a high press.

Buoyed by a fanatical home crowd and immersed in the celebrity culture surrounding the match in Seattle, the Socceroos were comprehensively outplayed.

There is a saying in soccer: “Never change a winning team.” But Popovic rang the changes. Connor Metcalfe and Nestory Irankunda, heroes in the previous game against Turkey, were dropped from the starting lineup and replaced with A-League duo Matthew Leckie and Nishan Velupillay.

It would be hard to find a coach at the World Cup – or, indeed, in junior soccer – who, in Popovic’s position, would have dropped his two goalscorers from the first game. It made little sense when the team was announced, and assistant coach Paul Okon’s halftime interview did little to explain it.

In the first half, Australia’s defence looked rattled; the occasion had got to them. The team sat far too deep in defence and offered nothing adventurous. Popovic’s strategy of defending in numbers and keeping things tight only works if you do, in fact, keep things tight. After Cameron Burgess’s own goal in the 11th minute, it was effectively game over. The US scored a second shortly before half-time and had the contest in a stranglehold from that moment.

Metcalfe and Irankunda came on at half-time. But while Australia showed more creativity and fight in the second half, they lacked the composure to show a real threat, and ultimately the only statistic on which they finished above their opponents was for the number of yellow cards.

What’s next for the Socceroos?

It’s far from over. Australia needs to regroup and approach the final group-stage match against Paraguay in the knowledge that a draw would be enough to progress to the next round. But playing for a draw can be a dangerous game, so the Socceroos need to remain sufficiently ambitious to pursue victory if the opportunity arises.

Ahead of the Paraguayans’ match against Turkey later today, it is difficult to speculate on precisely what approach Australia should take. Gustavo Alfaro’s Paraguay are similar to Popovic’s Socceroos: a strong defensive, counterattacking team. While the Americans put four goals past them, Paraguay conceded just ten goals in 18 World Cup qualifiers, the best defensive record in the competition.

The problem for the Paraguayans, however, is that they may need to win to have any chance of qualifying. This could benefit the Socceroos.

It is not yet clear whether the three points Australia already has in the bag will be enough to move into the knockout rounds, although it remains a possibility given the expanded tournament format. In the knockout phase, the top two teams from each of the 12 groups will also be joined by the eight third-placed teams with the best records.

A draw against Paraguay would leave Australia with four points – almost certainly enough to secure qualification and potentially even sufficient for second place in the group. So, all is not lost.

US dominating the group

From Australia’s perspective, the ideal scenario is for the US to defeat Turkey in their third and final match, thus continuing to take points off Australia’s rivals for qualification. Meanwhile, if Turkey inflict a second defeat of the group on Paraguay, however, Paraguay would be forced to attack against the Socceroos, potentially creating a situation in which goal difference becomes decisive. Australia may then require not only a positive result but also a superior goal difference to ensure progression to the knockout stages.

The US was simply better than the Socceroos today, exposing the limitations of Australia’s conservative approach. The good news is qualification remains within reach. The bad news is the Socceroos cannot continue to survive on grit alone; they must offer considerably more in attack.

Today was a lost opportunity for Australian football. If the first game against Turkey was a coaching masterclass by Popovic, this one was a disasterclass. When Irankunda and Metcalfe came on at half-time, the game changed – but too little, too late. Both Leckie and Velupillay were substituted. Cristian Volpato came on with roughly half an hour left to play, and made an attacking impact. It is clear he also needs to start against the Paraguayans.

Australia’s goalscoring song for the World Cup is Thunderstruck. We did not hear it today, but it perfectly summed up the Socceroos’ performance. They were thunderstruck in Seattle this morning.

Steve Georgakis, Senior Lecturer of Pedagogy and Sports Studies, University of Sydney

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

Vodafone Australia suffered a major nationwide outage today that may have affected millions of customers.

Customers of Australia’s third-largest telecommunications company in Darwin, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Canberra reported having no service for several hours early this morning.

At roughly 11am, Vodafone, which is owned by TPG Telecom, issued a statement saying it was aware customers were experiencing “intermittent issues” with its network. It said the issue “has been isolated and resolved, and services are now being progressively restored”.

However, many people online were still reporting problems with the network hours later.

What caused the outage?

In its statement, Vodafone said “the disruption was caused by a power outage at one of our network hubs”.

A power outage, though it seems unthinkable in an era when you would expect backup power and batteries to be installed in all key facilities, could cause equipment and systems to go offline, malfunction or fail.

The nationwide nature of the outage suggests the Vodafone network includes a centralised “core network”.

The impact of a fault at a “single point of failure” in a centralised core network could cause a cascading infrastructure and system failure. This would ultimately result in a national outage.

In a decentralised telecommunications network, a failure at one facility would cause the network traffic to be automatically switched through to an alternative facility. This improves the network’s resilience.

Vodafone recommended customers restart their phones to restore the network connection. But according to several online reports, this did not fix the problem.

This incident comes a month after Vodafone launched a major marketing campaign featuring US comedian Ali Wong. The campaign claims the company offers better value and coverage than one of its major competitors, Telstra.

Speaking to The Australian in March about the campaign and Vodafone’s promising future, TPG’s chief marketing officer Bec Darley said:

Any previous network issues no longer exist.

A spokesperson for Vodafone told The Conversation the company is “reviewing this incident and working to strengthen the resilience of our network to help prevent a recurrence”.

Too many national outages

There have been several other major telecommunications outages in recent years. These outages aren’t just an inconvenience. They can disrupt businesses and threaten public safety.

In September 2025, an Optus outage that affected people’s ability to call emergency services was linked to the death of two people.

Vodafone also suffered major network issues in 2021, 2016, 2012, 2011 and 2010.

Making matters worse for Vodafone this time around is the fact its own network status checker failed as well.

The Vodafone spokesperson told The Conversation the status checker page “is supported by some of the systems hosted at the same network hub that was impacted by the power issue, which is why it was temporarily unavailable”.

Much has been said recently about telecommunications companies needing to provide timely and factual information to consumers.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, in its role as the telecommunications regulator, has taken steps to provide stronger consumer protections during telecommunications outages.

For example, in April last year, the authority set new rules to ensure telecommunications customers are better informed during network outages.

The message isn’t getting through

In its most recent update, Australia’s Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman reported a 5.7% increase in consumer complaints over the past quarter.

This latest national telecommunications outage will be a major test for federal communications minister Anika Wells as well as the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

An announcement of an independent inquiry should be expected in coming days.

A power outage should not take down a national telecommunications network. The independent inquiry should fully report on Vodafone’s network design and where the single point of failures are.

It should also examine what can be done to improve reliability and resiliency.

It seems the message the federal government and the Australian Communications and Media Authority have been trying to impart to the telcos is not getting through.

Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, RMIT University

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

More than 100 million years ago, a flying reptile called a pterosaur flew over the oceans hunting squid and fish.

Much more recently, one of its wing bones was discovered in Brazil, transformed over the aeons into a fossil made of a complex assemblage of different chemicals and minerals.

And in new research published in iScience, my colleagues and I found that the fossil bone still holds secrets of the creature’s life, including microscopic inner structures of its bones and molecular traces of its biology and diet.

A fossil treasure from Brazil

The fossil comes from the Romualdo Formation in the Araripe Basin of northeastern Brazil, one of the world’s most spectacular fossil deposits. The site has yielded exquisitely preserved fish, turtles, crocodile relatives, and pterosaurs.

Many fossils from the Romualdo Formation are preserved inside rounded rock nodules known as carbonate concretions. These mineral structures form shortly after burial, effectively sealing the remains from the environment. Think of them as natural time capsules.

Our fossil is a hollow wing bone, or phalanx. Pterosaur bones were thin and lightweight to aid flight, so they are rarely preserved in such detail.

Using high-resolution CT scanning, we examined the bone’s interior without breaking it open. The scans revealed layers of minerals with different densities filling the cavity – evidence of a complex sequence of chemical events that preserved the bone. We used several other methods to identify the minerals.

Microbes helped decay – and preservation

The fossil’s exceptional preservation may have begun with decay. As the pterosaur’s body decomposed on the ancient seafloor, microbes broke down tissues and altered sediment chemistry. These changes triggered the rapid formation of phosphate minerals.

One mineral in particular, called fluorapatite, formed within and around the bone, stabilising delicate features before they could be lost. Under the microscope, we could still see microscopic canals that once carried nutrients through living tissue.

Mineral analysis revealed evidence of microbial activity. We detected barite and celestite, minerals associated with sulphur-using bacteria. These microbes drove chemical reactions that helped create the conditions necessary for preservation.

In other words, ancient microbes didn’t just decay the body, they also helped preserve it for science.

A mineral vault for ancient molecules

After early phosphate minerals stabilised the bone, a sequence of calcite layers gradually formed inside and around it. These derived largely from carbon released during the decay of fatty tissue.

First, a thin layer of fine-grained calcite formed along the bone surface, followed by a second, slightly coarser-grained one. Over a longer period of time, larger calcite crystals formed, ultimately filling the bone cavity.

Analysis showed this calcite was low in an isotope called carbon-13, which indicates it partly came from organic carbon sources, such as fatty lipids and residual bone material. In contrast, any remaining organic matter in the bone appears to have relatively high levels of carbon-13.

The multi-layered mineral barrier acted like a geological vault, protecting delicate structures and organic compounds trapped in the bone from chemical degradation for millions of years. This protection allowed molecular traces such as steroid biomarkers and collagen fibre patterns to survive, giving us a rare window into the biology and diet of this ancient flying reptile.

Molecular traces of ancient life

Within this mineralised structure, we detected molecular traces of life called steranes, which are derived from steroidal lipids once present in living cells. To our knowledge, this is the first time steroid biomarkers have been reported from a pterosaur fossil.

Even more exciting, these molecules carry dietary clues. Carbon isotope analysis of cholesterol-derived compounds suggests this pterosaur likely fed on fish or squid-like marine animals, which is what we would expect from the shape of its teeth and skull.

The fossil also preserves microscopic structures resembling collagen fibres, the protein framework that strengthens bone. Although chemically altered over millions of years, the fibre patterns remain visible and resemble those seen in modern birds, which are distant relatives of pterosaurs.

Reading fossils in new ways

Discoveries like this one are transforming how we study fossils. Instead of examining only bone shapes, we can now recover chemical and molecular fingerprints as well.

Understanding how these exceptional fossils form may help identify other specimens capable of preserving ancient biomolecules. More broadly, our findings show that under the right conditions, molecular traces of life can survive for more than 100 million years.

Even after millions upon millions of years, ancient life can still leave behind chemical clues waiting to be discovered. As analytical techniques continue to advance and unusual modes of preservation become better understood, there is increasing potential to recover previously inaccessible information.

In the future, we may even be able to detect ancient DNA fragments or other molecular remnants in exceptionally preserved fossils, including those of dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

Kliti Grice, John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Organic and Isotope Geochemistry, Curtin University

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

It was clear that something had gone seriously wrong with the thousand-strong swarm of drones twinkling above Darling Harbour during the Vivid Sydney festival last month. Many suddenly started flying out of formation. Almost 90 fell from the sky and into the dark water below.

Thankfully no one was injured. Yet the drone show failure, which has been blamed on radio interference, highlighted a challenge facing all autonomous aircraft: what happens when things go wrong?

This is an important question, given autonomous air taxis that fly passengers above traffic and autonomous drones that deliver packages across cities could become a familiar sight within the next decade. In the United States, for example, drone delivery company Wing recently announced it is expanding its partnership with Walmart across seven more cities.

These technologies will occasionally experience failures. But an aircraft cannot simply pull over to the side of the road. So safety depends not only on preventing failures but on ensuring aircraft can respond safely when they occur.

Designed to tolerate some failures

Modern autonomous aircraft have a range of features to ensure that no single failure leads to the loss of the aircraft. These include multiple motors, distributed propulsion, backup flight computers and software that can tolerate faults.

But even highly reliable and resilient technologies can and will fail in unexpected ways. A minor software problem, a faulty sensor or a sudden change in conditions may not be serious on their own. But together they can create larger challenges.

Cities create further risk. Changing winds around buildings, interruptions to navigation signals and large numbers of aircraft operating in the same area can all make it harder to manage unexpected events.

In a conventional aircraft, a pilot is responsible for handling emergencies. If a serious problem occurs, they draw on their training and experience to assess the situation, identify a suitable landing site and guide the aircraft to the ground while minimising risk to people nearby.

In the case of autonomous aircraft, that responsibility shifts from the pilot to the aircraft itself. Autonomous systems must be able to recognise a problem, assess the available options and decide what to do next. For example, where is the safest place to land? Could people, vehicles or buildings be put at risk? Can the aircraft safely reach the chosen location?

These are not simply technical questions. They are decisions with real-world consequences. Responding to emergencies is therefore not just a backup procedure. It becomes a fundamental part of how autonomous aircraft operate safely.

A system that must see, decide and act

For an autonomous aircraft to respond safely to an emergency, it must do three things very quickly.

First, it needs to understand its surroundings. It must identify possible landing locations while taking account of people, vehicles, buildings and other hazards. This information may be incomplete or constantly changing.

Next, it must decide which option carries the lowest risk. The safest landing site is not always the closest one, and there may be no perfect solution. Instead, the system must choose the option most likely to minimise harm.

Finally, it must safely guide the aircraft to that location. This can be particularly challenging if the aircraft is already experiencing a fault or operating in difficult weather conditions.

These tasks can’t be treated separately. They must work together as a single safety system, making decisions and responding in real time as events unfold.

Planning for things to go wrong

Much of the current focus in industry and regulation is on preventing failures through rigorous testing, certification and backup systems. This is important, but it is only part of the safety challenge.

There’s far less discussion about what happens after a failure occurs. How quickly can an aircraft identify a safe place to land? Can it continue to operate safely if some of its systems are no longer working as intended?

The most resilient systems are not necessarily those that never experience problems. They are the ones that can recognise emerging issues, adapt to changing circumstances and reduce risk before a situation becomes critical.

In this view, an emergency landing is not a last-minute response. It is a capability that is planned for throughout the flight and ready to be used whenever needed.

Safety is judged on the worst day

Autonomous aircraft have the potential to make transport faster, cleaner and more accessible. But its long-term success will depend on more than technology or economics.

It will depend on whether the public can trust these systems to respond safely when things go wrong.

The recent drone incident at Vivid Sydney festival offers a useful reminder. The failure itself became headlines, but the more important question was how the system responded. The drones did not simply disappear from the sky. Safety procedures were activated and, most importantly, nobody was injured.

As autonomous aircraft become more common over our cities, similar questions will arise. The future of autonomous aircraft will not be decided by how well they perform under normal conditions. It will be decided by how they handle the rare situations that nobody wants, but everyone expects to be planned for.

Luis Mejias, Associate Professor in Aerospace and Autonomous Systems, Queensland University of Technology and Jonathan Roberts, Professor in Robotics, Queensland University of Technology

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

You’re browsing a major online marketplace for a warm winter jacket, when a sponsored listing catches your eye: a black, fleece-lined jacket, prominently priced for sale from A$18.99 each. It’s just what you want. So you click through, ready to grab a bargain.

But when you land on the page, then select a jacket from the drop down menu, the price instantly jumps to $39.99.

It turns out the $18.99 was actually for a different product – a waterproof storage bag – which was inexplicably listed along with three variants of the jacket.

This is a common strategy used by online sellers. The platform’s search algorithm displays the headline image of the jacket, but pairs it with a more attractive price of a different product.

Frustrated? You’re not alone. Across online forums such as Reddit, or deal-hunting sites such as OzBargain, shoppers have long warned others about this type of “multi-variation listing” on popular shopping websites and apps.

It’s not just wasting your time: it can be illegal.

This kind of visual bait-and-switch trick could potentially be misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law. It may also breach the prohibition on “bait advertising”, applying to ads that promote “sale” prices on products that aren’t available, or available only in very limited quantities.

And a proposed prohibition on unfair trading practices, now before parliament, could soon give Australians even more power to complain.

Why visual tricks like these work

Academic research helps explain why this kind of design is so effective, and also such a problem.

When a price claim and a product image are presented in close proximity, consumers naturally assume that the price applies to the pictured product.

It is a “visual superiority effect” in advertising. Research has shown that visual superiority effect means consumers process images faster and more automatically than text.

When visual and textual elements conflict, consumers rely more heavily on the visual content in forming their judgements, and form less critical thoughts when it comes to the text, such as a product description.

Consumer watchdogs have warned this kind of design tactic is a type of “dark pattern”: tactics used to nudge, manipulate or trick you into spending more money than you’d planned, or provide personal data that’s not needed.

Research has shown nearly all consumers are susceptible to these manipulative tricks under the right conditions.

Is this actually misleading under Australian law?

Let’s go back to the example of the black winter jacket you clicked on thinking it was available from $18.99, only to discover that price was for a different product.

Is this visual bait-and-switch – where a lower price has been paired with a product image it does not apply to – misleading under Australian consumer law?

Yes, it probably is.

Retailers should be warned. The national consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), can prosecute for misleading people with eye-catching headline claims, if those are not true once you look more closely at the detail.

For instance, just over a decade ago the ACCC pursued TPG Internet in court over misleading ads, which led to a $2 million penalty. The ads had prominent headlines about attractive internet prices – with much less prominent terms qualifying the offer.

It went all the way to the High Court, which ruled that if consumers were drawn into what the judges called “the marketing web” by a misleading “dominant message”, it could be enough to be misleading under the Trade Practices Act.

Not all seemingly deceptive ads will necessarily fall within the category of misleading conduct. It can be harder to prove if the qualification to the images or pricing is revealed before the consumer adds the product to their basket.

But Australia’s laws look set to become a bit clearer on this front.

New legislation currently before federal parliament would introduce a prohibition on unfair trading practices that manipulate consumers, or “unreasonably distort” the environment in which a decision is being made to the detriment of the consumer.

That new prohibition is intended to capture “dark pattern” tactics that are “nudging or pressuring consumers into unintended actions”.

How consumer backlash and complaints can help

Research shows that when shoppers feel they have been intentionally misled, the damage to the brand’s reputation can be severe and immediate.

Price confusion doesn’t just cause frustration; it triggers a deep sense of unfairness. That unfairness can translate into action: consumers abandoning their carts, switching to competitors, and complaining to family and friends.

If you come across shopping platforms where there are consistent, manipulative bait-and-switch tactics like this being used, it may be worth asking: is it time to shop somewhere else?

Or, if you’re annoyed enough to take action, take a screenshot and contact the business.

If they don’t stop bait-and-switch sales listings, anyone can make a report to the ACCC about a false or misleading claim. Reports from customers help inform the ACCC’s education, compliance and enforcement work.

The ACCC has named misleading and manipulative pricing practices among its enforcement priorities for this financial year. Anyone selling to Australian customers should be on notice.

Jessica Pallant, Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University; Adrian R. Camilleri, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Technology Sydney, and Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne

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

Bona Sforza was one of the most remarkable women of Renaissance Europe. Born into one of Italy’s leading ruling families and connected to figures such as Lucrezia Borgia through the tangled politics of Italian dynasties, she became queen consort of Poland and grand duchess of Lithuania.

More than a royal bride, she brought to Poland the administrative, financial and cultural ideas of Renaissance Italy. She understood how wealth, land and government could be used to strengthen a dynasty.

Although never a reigning monarch, Bona became one of the most politically influential women ever to sit on the Polish throne. Admirers praised her intelligence and determination. Critics condemned her as ambitious, overbearing and dangerously powerful. That tension lies at the heart of her story.

The debate over Bona’s legacy raises a question that still resonates today: why are women who wield power effectively so often judged differently from men who do the same?

Training for greatness

Bona Sforza, born in 1494, was the daughter of the Duke of Milan. She arrived in Poland in 1518 as a royal bride of Sigismund I. Contemporary observers praised her intelligence, learning and virtue, qualities they described as “rare among maidens”.

Bona grew up in Bari, Italy. Her mother, Duchess Isabella of Aragon, ruled the duchy of Bari in her own right. She exercised authority with confidence. Isabella ensured that Bona received a humanist education in languages, history, law, moral philosophy and public speaking, preparing her not simply to marry well, but to govern.

Bona’s tutors shaped her view of the world and of herself. They instilled in her the belief that she was “born to rule”, preparing her to see leadership not as a privilege, but as a responsibility.

Government required judgement, alliances and financial skill.

Bona learned to treat land as a working system of connected parts: fields, forests, tenants, mills, markets, workers and, of course, taxes.

Bona used this knowledge to strengthen the Jagiellon dynasty, the ruling family of Poland and Lithuania. She treated royal lands as productive assets, recovering estates that had been lost, leased or mortgaged by earlier rulers.

By 1555, alongside the lands assigned to her as queen, she controlled the revenues of 15 royal towns and 191 villages.

The result was greater dynastic wealth and greater independence and leverage in the royal house dealings with powerful nobles.

Land reforms

Bona’s reforms focused on making royal lands more productive and their revenues more reliable. She recovered lost Crown property, improved record-keeping, and insisted that surveys and legal decisions be documented and enforced.

She also promoted economic development through new settlements, markets, transport links and local infrastructure. These measures increased trade and created new income for the royal family.

Accused of poisoning rivals

Yet the more successful Bona became, the more criticism she attracted. Male nobles did not simply say they opposed higher taxes or the consolidation of the royal domain. They often framed her authority as unnatural.

One of the powerful courtiers, Krzysztof Szydłowiecki, put it bluntly in 1527: “nothing happens without her will”.

Her success provoked fierce opposition. During the Lwów rebellion of 1537, nobles accused Bona of greed, overreach and wielding too much influence. Some complained that earlier queens had no role in government, but under Bona, “everything happens differently” because she had “as much power as she wishes”.

Queens were expected to be wives, not political actors. Yet powerful men also accumulated land, built networks and influenced government and church appointments without attracting the same criticism.

After her death in 1557, Bona’s reputation darkened. She was accused of poisoning rivals, practising witchcraft, manipulating politics and corrupting government. Some accusations grew from real political conflicts, but others reflected discomfort with a woman who exercised power so effectively.

Her recovery of royal lands threatened powerful nobles. Critics recast her competence as greed, her authority as overreach, and her political skill as dangerous ambition.

Women in leadership face familiar criticism

Like Bona, women leaders today are still often judged by standards that men rarely face.

A United Nations report on corporate leadership found that across 20 advanced economies, women held only 6% of chief executive officer roles, 7% of board chair roles, and 15% of chief financial officer roles.

Women’s access to capital is another parallel. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on women entrepreneurs found that, in 2024, women were about half as likely as men to report borrowing from a bank to start, run or expand a business. A US report on venture capital funding for tech companies shows progress, with female-founded companies raising a record amount. But the debate continues because access to investment remains uneven.

Modern attitudes to women also matter. A Stanford University institute describes the “likeability penalty”: women leaders who appear competent and assertive can be judged as less likeable, while men often receive praise for similar behaviour.

Five centuries later, the pattern remains familiar. Bona’s wealth, discipline and confidence strengthened the monarchy. They also made her a target. They made her easier to attack.

The question her life leaves us with is simple: when women manage power well, do societies recognise leadership, or do they still call it ambition?

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Professor of History, Australian Catholic University

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

When many of us think about drug overdose, we picture young people at a music festival or people dependent on street heroin.

But the latest figures from the Penington Institute show older Australians are increasingly dying from overdoses.

On average, seven people died every day from a drug-related overdose. Unintentional drug overdoses make up more than 80% of those deaths.

For the first time in a decade, this year’s report showed people aged 50–59 years made up the highest proportion of unintentional deaths (25.5%). People 40–49 years old are a close second (25.4%).

Those aged 50-59 years also had the second-highest intentional drug-related deaths (19.9%) after people in their 70s (22%).

So why are overdoses increasing in this age group? Are over-50s simply using more drugs or is something else going on?

What illicit drugs do older people use?

Illicit drug use is more common among younger adults than older Australians. Use peaks in people’s 20s then tends to decline with age.

People who are now in their 40s and 50s came of age during the 1980s and 1990s, when Australia had relatively high levels of heroin, amphetamine and cannabis use.

While many people reduced or stopped using drugs as they aged, a smaller group continued to use over the course of their lives, contributing to an ageing cohort of people who use drugs.

But the gap between younger and older people using illicit drugs has narrowed over time. Rates among younger people have remained relatively stable, and in some cases have declined slightly, while rates among people aged 50 years and over have increased.

Cannabis is by far the most commonly used illicit drug among older Australians, but non-medical use of pharmaceutical opioids also contributes to the burden of harm in people in middle and older age.

It’s not just illicit drugs

People often assume overdoses only happen to people who use illegal drugs. But prescription medicines also play a role.

Older adults are over-represented in deaths involving pharmaceutical drugs obtained legally through the health-care system.

That doesn’t mean these medicines are unsafe when used properly. But they can become dangerous when combined with each other, mixed with alcohol, taken in higher doses than prescribed, or used by people whose bodies have become more sensitive with age.

Australians over 50 are also more likely to have a number of health conditions that require medication, such as chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety and depression.

Many have different doctors prescribing for different health conditions and may take several medicines at the same time. These medicines can interact in unpredictable ways if not carefully managed.

Prescription opioids, commonly used for the short-term treatment of injury and pain, are the most common drug type involved in overdose deaths. They contribute to almost half of all unintentional drug overdoses. These are medicines many Australians have used or would recognise, such as oxycodone, codeine and tramadol.

Benzodiazepines, sometimes prescribed for short-term treatment of anxiety and insomnia, also play a major role in overdoses. Many Australians may recognise these medicines by their brand names: Valium (diazepam), Xanax (alprazolam) and Ronypnol (flunitrazepam).

When these two types of medicines are combined they can be lethal. More than 70% of unintentional deaths involve two or more types of drugs.

Nearly 20% of unintentional drug-induced deaths involved alcohol. This was a decrease on previous years, but other data shows risky alcohol use is increasing among women in mid life, in particular, which could increase future risk.

Ageing also changes how our bodies process drugs

Getting older means our liver and kidneys become less efficient at breaking down and removing medicines from the body. Older adults also have lower muscle mass and different body composition. This all affects how the body processes drugs.

The same dose that was tolerated at 40 may have a stronger effect at 60.

People who use drugs are living longer

As we learn more about preventing disease and staying healthy, we have developed better treatments for a range of illnesses, so people generally are living longer. And that includes people who use illicit drugs.

People who use illicit drugs have benefited from advances in hepatitis C and HIV treatment. Their health has also benefited from better access to harm-reduction options such as naloxone (which reverses opioid overdose), needle syringe programs and medically supervised injecting facilities. Opioid agonist treatments, such as methadone and buprenorphine, are also now much more accessible.

‘Late onset’ illicit drug use

There is some limited evidence that a small proportion of people in their 40s and 50s are using illicit drugs for the first time or returning to drug use after a long break. Some may self-medicate with illicit drugs rather than seeing a doctor.

Life transitions such as retirement, bereavement, loneliness and declining physical health can all affect mental health and increase vulnerability to illicit drug use.

Income also tends to increase with age and peaks between 40 and 60 years of age. Illicit drug use rates are highest among people who are more socioeconomically advantaged.

At the same time, older people are less likely to be screened for alcohol and other drug problems. Health professionals often overlook alcohol and other drug use in people in their 50s because they do not expect to see it.

Stigma plays a role, too

An older person with signs of medication dependence may not identify with traditional drug treatment services. They may worry about being judged or fear losing their independence if they disclose drug use to a health professional or family member.

This means people over 50 more easily fall through the cracks.

The growing number of overdose deaths among Australians in their 50s should prompt us to rethink who is at risk and how we respond.

Overdose prevention should not focus solely on illicit drugs or specific age groups. It also needs to consider:

• safer use of medicines and more cautious prescribing practices
• good communication between doctors and their patients to identify risky combinations
• reducing stigma so we can have open conversations about alcohol and other drug use at every age.

If we want to prevent these deaths, we need to recognise that drug-related harm does not disappear with age. It may just change shape. And so must our responses.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. If you’re worried about your own or someone else’s drug use, you can call the National Alcohol and other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.

Nicole Lee, Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne based), Curtin University and Katinka van de Ven, Alcohol and other drug specialist, UNSW Sydney

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

When many of us think about drug overdose, we picture young people at a music festival or people dependent on street heroin.

But the latest figures from the Penington Institute show older Australians are increasingly dying from overdoses.

On average, seven people died every day from a drug-related overdose. Unintentional drug overdoses make up more than 80% of those deaths.

For the first time in a decade, this year’s report showed people aged 50–59 years made up the highest proportion of unintentional deaths (25.5%). People 40–49 years old are a close second (25.4%).

Those aged 50-59 years also had the second-highest intentional drug-related deaths (19.9%) after people in their 70s (22%).

So why are overdoses increasing in this age group? Are over-50s simply using more drugs or is something else going on?

What illicit drugs do older people use?

Illicit drug use is more common among younger adults than older Australians. Use peaks in people’s 20s then tends to decline with age.

People who are now in their 40s and 50s came of age during the 1980s and 1990s, when Australia had relatively high levels of heroin, amphetamine and cannabis use.

While many people reduced or stopped using drugs as they aged, a smaller group continued to use over the course of their lives, contributing to an ageing cohort of people who use drugs.

But the gap between younger and older people using illicit drugs has narrowed over time. Rates among younger people have remained relatively stable, and in some cases have declined slightly, while rates among people aged 50 years and over have increased.

Cannabis is by far the most commonly used illicit drug among older Australians, but non-medical use of pharmaceutical opioids also contributes to the burden of harm in people in middle and older age.

It’s not just illicit drugs

People often assume overdoses only happen to people who use illegal drugs. But prescription medicines also play a role.

Older adults are over-represented in deaths involving pharmaceutical drugs obtained legally through the health-care system.

That doesn’t mean these medicines are unsafe when used properly. But they can become dangerous when combined with each other, mixed with alcohol, taken in higher doses than prescribed, or used by people whose bodies have become more sensitive with age.

Australians over 50 are also more likely to have a number of health conditions that require medication, such as chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety and depression.

Many have different doctors prescribing for different health conditions and may take several medicines at the same time. These medicines can interact in unpredictable ways if not carefully managed.

Prescription opioids, commonly used for the short-term treatment of injury and pain, are the most common drug type involved in overdose deaths. They contribute to almost half of all unintentional drug overdoses. These are medicines many Australians have used or would recognise, such as oxycodone, codeine and tramadol.

Benzodiazepines, sometimes prescribed for short-term treatment of anxiety and insomnia, also play a major role in overdoses. Many Australians may recognise these medicines by their brand names: Valium (diazepam), Xanax (alprazolam) and Ronypnol (flunitrazepam).

When these two types of medicines are combined they can be lethal. More than 70% of unintentional deaths involve two or more types of drugs.

Nearly 20% of unintentional drug-induced deaths involved alcohol. This was a decrease on previous years, but other data shows risky alcohol use is increasing among women in mid life, in particular, which could increase future risk.

Ageing also changes how our bodies process drugs

Getting older means our liver and kidneys become less efficient at breaking down and removing medicines from the body. Older adults also have lower muscle mass and different body composition. This all affects how the body processes drugs.

The same dose that was tolerated at 40 may have a stronger effect at 60.

People who use drugs are living longer

As we learn more about preventing disease and staying healthy, we have developed better treatments for a range of illnesses, so people generally are living longer. And that includes people who use illicit drugs.

People who use illicit drugs have benefited from advances in hepatitis C and HIV treatment. Their health has also benefited from better access to harm-reduction options such as naloxone (which reverses opioid overdose), needle syringe programs and medically supervised injecting facilities. Opioid agonist treatments, such as methadone and buprenorphine, are also now much more accessible.

‘Late onset’ illicit drug use

There is some limited evidence that a small proportion of people in their 40s and 50s are using illicit drugs for the first time or returning to drug use after a long break. Some may self-medicate with illicit drugs rather than seeing a doctor.

Life transitions such as retirement, bereavement, loneliness and declining physical health can all affect mental health and increase vulnerability to illicit drug use.

Income also tends to increase with age and peaks between 40 and 60 years of age. Illicit drug use rates are highest among people who are more socioeconomically advantaged.

At the same time, older people are less likely to be screened for alcohol and other drug problems. Health professionals often overlook alcohol and other drug use in people in their 50s because they do not expect to see it.

Stigma plays a role, too

An older person with signs of medication dependence may not identify with traditional drug treatment services. They may worry about being judged or fear losing their independence if they disclose drug use to a health professional or family member.

This means people over 50 more easily fall through the cracks.

The growing number of overdose deaths among Australians in their 50s should prompt us to rethink who is at risk and how we respond.

Overdose prevention should not focus solely on illicit drugs or specific age groups. It also needs to consider:

• safer use of medicines and more cautious prescribing practices
• good communication between doctors and their patients to identify risky combinations
• reducing stigma so we can have open conversations about alcohol and other drug use at every age.

If we want to prevent these deaths, we need to recognise that drug-related harm does not disappear with age. It may just change shape. And so must our responses.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. If you’re worried about your own or someone else’s drug use, you can call the National Alcohol and other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.

Nicole Lee, Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne based), Curtin University and Katinka van de Ven, Alcohol and other drug specialist, UNSW Sydney

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

Have you ever been out at night and seen a streak of light blast across the sky and disappear? Ever wonder where that shooting star came from, or how it got to be in your sky?

As the director of the Peters Observatory at Hamilton College, I have seen many similar streaks across the sky, as I spend late nights at the observatory, and I am here to tell you that what you saw isn’t a star at all. You observed the end of a comet or asteroid’s 4.6-billion-year journey right before your eyes.

Remnants from the early solar system

Roughly 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was in its infancy. A vast ball of gas and dust that would become our solar system was accumulating matter in its center, forming what would eventually become our Sun. It was also condensing dust in smaller patches farther from the center that would merge into the first chunks of materials, called planetesimals.

Asteroids formed from planetesimals in the inner portions of the solar system, near the Sun. This location in the center of the solar system was warm, so the planetesimals were made mostly of the rocks and metals that could withstand the heat. The biggest of these chunks would congeal with others and form the terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The remaining planetesimals that did not form into the terrestrial planets are the asteroids of today, left to orbit the inner portion of the solar system.

Comets formed in the outer parts of the solar system, where it was cold enough that any water, or similar hydrogen-based compounds, took the form of ice. The planetesimals forming in this region were composed of not just rock and metal but these ices as well.

Some of the planetesimals became big enough, fast enough, that they had enough gravitational pull to hold onto large atmospheres composed of the very abundant early solar system gases, such as hydrogen and helium. These planetesimals became the Jovian planets of today: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, the planetesimals that did not form into the Jovian planets were left to travel through the solar system as comets.

Origin of meteors

Asteroids are still abundant in the inner solar system, so inevitably some will collide with Earth. When a chunk of rock enters Earth’s atmosphere, it’s traveling at dozens of miles per second. As it enters, it may create a thunderlike sonic boom in its wake. When it travels through the air faster than the speed of sound, the asteroid produces a shock wave, which can generate that boom.

During its journey through the atmosphere over tens of miles, the asteroid collides with air molecules, and the incredible temperatures and pressure usually vaporize it. That trail of vaporizing particles breaking off the asteroid causes a bright streak of light across the sky called a meteor, or colloquially a shooting star.

Comets, though typically found in the outer solar system, can also cause meteors, and even meteor showers. A few comets take long, elliptical paths through the inner solar system every year.

These objects, sometimes called “dirty snowballs” because they are made of dust and ices, tend to slowly melt as they get too close to the Sun, causing the comet to develop a tail of gas and debris left in its wake.

If the path of the comet intersects with Earth’s orbit, the Earth will collide with these debris fields in its yearly orbit around the Sun. As that debris enters the atmosphere, it vaporizes, causing numerous trails of light called meteor showers. Since this happens in the same part of our orbit every year, meteor showers are yearly events. If you find a dark sky, you can see dozens of meteors every hour during these annual meteor showers.

Finding meteorites

The meteors that are large enough to make it through the Earth’s atmosphere and crash into the surface are called meteorites. Meteorites tend to come from asteroids that were originally larger than a football field.

It can be difficult to identify meteorites, because they look just like Earth rocks. Typically, people recover meteorites in geologically unchanging regions, such as deserts or ice fields, where the meteorites stand out against the landscape.

They are often made of stone, nickel and iron and are likely magnetic. Many have irregular or pock-marked shapes, while others have a smooth crust from their time burning up in our atmosphere.

Meteorites are quite rare and important to the study of the early solar system. If you believe you’ve found one, you should verify your rock’s features fit those of a meteorite and then contact local geologists.

Next time you see a meteor in the night sky, remember that you are witnessing the end of its journey, spanning billions of years, as it burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Adam Lark, Associate Professor of Instruction for Physics, Hamilton College

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

Despite being one of the Liberals’ strongest performers, frontbencher Jonno Duniam is quitting politics by the end of this year – and leaving with some regrets.

Duniam, 43, is Angus Taylor’s home affairs spokesman and has been in the Senate for nearly a decade. He’s been central in the crafting of the opposition’s immigration policy, which is still to be fully released.

Duniam joined the podcast to reflect on his time in politics, the future of the Liberals, dealing with One Nation – and how his sons responded to the news of him quitting politics.

I’ve been in and around politics for 25 years, ten of those as a senator […] It means you aren’t there to help with the very basic things, like getting ready for school and packing lunches and picking up and dropping off.

[…] It is not a good feeling sitting in Canberra doing your job while there is an issue that needs dealing with for family. And I know that is a common issue. I’ve talked about with colleagues across the political spectrum […] This is not unique to politics [… But] when you’re 20, 25 weeks of the year away from home, it does mount up.

Duniam recounts breaking the news of his retirement to his three boys, aged 11 to 17.

I snuck out early to pick up three copies of the local newspaper in which the story was broken that I was going to be leaving politics. And I left a copy of the paper for each of my sons. And my youngest son, Spencer, got up and read it and he was heard to say, as he was flicking through the paper, ‘I never thought this day would come.’ He’s my youngest.

My oldest has missed out on a lot of me being around, he’s on the verge of turning 18. And my 15 year old, I think you could only say is elated by this decision. So I know very much that I’ve made the right call, and I think those boys are going to benefit.

Why he’s leaving, even with some guilt

Duniam denied he was quitting politics because of the Coalition’s faltering performance – now running a long way third in the polls, behind One Nation and Labor:

It’s got nothing to do with where we’re at, but everything to do with my own life and where I’m at […] Now that does leave me with a feeling of guilt, I’ll be honest. There’s a sense of regret in leaving friends and trusted colleagues on the field of battle, when they’re going to keep fighting a very, very tough fight and I’m leaving.

[…] That is something that doesn’t sit easily with me, but […] I can’t do my job justice and be a father to my boys properly. Something was going to have to give and I made the decision that it is my boys and my family that came first, ahead of this job, after ten years of giving it everything I’ve got.

Looking for ‘signs of life’ in the Liberals

On why the Liberals are in such a bad state, Duniam said they did “nothing” during the nine months after the 2025 election.

For the first nine months after that devastating election result, we did nothing. We did nothing to turn the dial […] When you’re out in the community, people [were] saying, you know ‘come on, you guys have got to get your act together.’

[…] In the lead up to our leadership change, there was frankly you know, no sign of us doing that […] And that’s why, in my belief, people started changing when it comes to answering those polling questions – ‘Who would you vote for? One Nation, the Liberals, Labor, Green’ – people were going from the Libs to One Nation in great numbers.

He said since becoming Liberal leader, Angus Taylor had been providing “signs of life” for Australians who’d turned away from the party – and while “it’s far from job done”, the Liberals were “on the right track” now.

Why it’s ‘mad’ to be talking One Nation deals now

On potential preference deals with One Nation, Duniam said it’s “mad” to suggest the party should be considering that now:

I do not for one minute subscribe to this notion that we should be having conversations about preference deals or coalition governments right now. It’s mad to suggest that that’s what we should be doing as a party. Would you ever see a Labor politician saying, ‘you know what, it’s okay if you want to vote Green, because we are not, sort of, Green enough for you’.

On the Coalition’s immigration policy

Duniam isn’t quitting politics immediately, partly because he wants to finalise his party’s immigration policy before he goes.

On the challenge of crafting that policy without dividing Australians, Duniam said:

The immigration debate – if you just take the headline out of a press conference that I may have done or Angus or whoever – it’s easy to turn it into a divisive anti-immigrant rant from the Liberals trying to outdo One Nation.

[But] when you sit down and explain it to someone who might have misapprehended our policy intentions, they accept what we’re doing and think, ‘oh, that’s actually not so bad after all beyond the headline’. That is the difficulty in Australian politics, of course.

We’ve got to talk to all Australians on issues that are important to them. And […] if we keep trying out One Nation, One Nation on […] particular issues like immigration to the exclusion of others, then we won’t win back these votes. But I know our plan will be for all Australians, on a range of issues that everyone is concerned about.

Attracting young talent, despite ‘clowns in Canberra’

Duniam was still confident young people would keep wanting to join politics, as he did at an early age. But he agreed the state of the politics today doesn’t always help.

We don’t help ourselves when we behave in certain ways, and people think ‘who would be a politician? Look at those clowns in Canberra.’ So there is an element of the nature of the industry we’re in that probably is less helpful to attracting young people than the busyness of the job itself.

He said none of his three sons wanted to run for politics now – but he would support them if they ever changed their minds.

I think we do need good people – and I hope to raise good men in my sons – to run for parliament […] I’ve loved doing this job. Yes, there have been times I’ve hated it. Of course, I’d be lying to you if I said otherwise. But, by and large, it’s been the privilege and honour of a lifetime to represent Tasmania in the Senate.

[…] That is the one thing I will leave parliament knowing […] There are a lot of flawed, broken people in that building, and I happen to be one of them. But, for the most part, people want to the best they can for the people they represent. I might disagree with how they want to get there, or the policy or the law that they’re proposing, but I applaud them for wanting to have a go.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

UK media celebrity Jeremy Clarkson this week revealed he has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

He told his co-stars about the diagnosis on air during the latest season of Clarkson’s Farm. At the time of filming, he said he didn’t know whether he would be back for another season. However, he said the cancer had been caught early and he was receiving treatment.

Clarkson specifically noted his cancer was “aggressive”.

So what does this actually mean? And what makes some cancers more aggressive than others?

What is an aggressive cancer?

When doctors and scientists refer to a cancer being aggressive, they mean it’s fast-growing.

This is the definition authorities, such as the National Cancer Institute in the United States or the Cancer Council Victoria in Australia, use.

Cancers occur when your body’s cells acquire DNA mutations that alter their behaviour. For instance, certain mutations might lead cells to evade death or divide uncontrollably. Mutations can also affect how fast this division occurs.

For instance, DNA mutations leading to excessive production of the MYC protein allow cells to grow and divide more rapidly. Dividing quickly and uncontrollably is the simplest measure of cancer aggression.

As the name suggests, aggressive cancers are quite dangerous. The speed at which they can develop and grow means they are more likely to be diagnosed only once they have reached a more advanced stage and spread to other parts of the body.

Sadly, once cancers have spread and are considered “advanced”, they are very difficult to treat.

However, if an aggressive cancer is caught early, there are usually treatment options.

How about treatment?

Sometimes, the aggressiveness of a cancer can be exploited as a weakness and used against it.

For example, chemotherapy works by damaging DNA. When cells divide, if their DNA is also damaged, they die. But as cancer cells grow faster than most other cells in our body, the chemotherapy essentially destroys the cancer cells first. Therefore, fast-growing cancer cells can be more susceptible to chemotherapy.

A good example is the blood cancer known as Burkitt lymphoma. Burkitt lymphomas generally express abnormally high levels of MYC protein, making them highly aggressive.

Most Burkitt lymphoma patients (64–85%) can be cured with intensive chemotherapy. This was also one of the first cancer types to be cured by chemotherapy alone, back in the 1960s.

Why are some cancers more aggressive than others?

Every cancer is different. Different genetic mutations drive different abnormal behaviours, and these behaviours are linked to the cancer’s aggressiveness. And, for every part of the body, there can be dozens of different sub-types of cancer.

However, many cancers share certain characteristics, meaning we can make some generalisations.

For example, pancreatic cancers and a sub-type of breast cancer known as “triple-negative” are highly aggressive. They grow rapidly and have limited treatment options.

But there are always new treatments being developed for many aggressive cancers once thought untreatable.

One example is the development of a new drug that targets the cancer-promoting protein, KRAS. In clinical trials, this drug nearly doubled the survival of people with aggressive pancreatic cancers.

How about Clarkson’s cancer?

It is impossible to speculate about Clarkson’s case without more information. Most prostate cancers are not considered aggressive, and people can live for many years with slower growing, non-spreading, low-risk forms.

For more aggressive forms, the prognosis often depends on how early the cancer is detected. Prostate cancer is more common in men over the age of 50, but symptoms are not always apparent early, and screening techniques are imperfect.

If you are concerned about your cancer risk, it’s best to see your doctor for personal advice.

Sarah Diepstraten, Senior Research Officer, Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research) and John (Eddie) La Marca, Senior Research Officer, Blood Cells and Blood Cancer, 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.

In the renowned Holocaust documentary, Shoah (1985), former SS guard Franz Suchomel sings a song prisoners had to perform in the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. After finishing the last line, he chillingly asks the director, Claude Lanzmann: “Satisfied? That’s unique. No Jew knows that today!”

More than 30 years before, in 1945, Yehuda Eismann, a Holocaust survivor, published a little collection of songs, conveyed to him by Jewish refugees passing through Bucharest in Romania. He called it Mima’amakim: folkslider fun lagers un getos in poyln 1939-1944 (Out of the Depths: Folks Songs from the Camps and Ghettos of Poland, 1939-1944).

“The poets and the others who sang the songs are for the most part no longer living,” he wrote in the introduction. But the songs survived. Passed from mouth to mouth, they lived among survivors. Eismann and his team collected and recorded them to create a “memorial stone for Polish Jewry”, a community largely destroyed by the Holocaust.

Review: Out of the depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs – by Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher (Manchester University Press)

Eighty years later, two Sydney-based scholars, Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher, republished the songs, with information about their authors. The collection shows that the Nazi plan to erase the memory of those slated for destruction – their suffering, but also their resilience – failed.

A lucky coincidence led to the recovery of these hidden voices of the Holocaust. In 2013, Olga R., a Sydney based Polish–Jewish survivor, passed away. Her family found a little booklet containing songs written in Yiddish in her cupboard. They shared it with Toltz, which led to more than a decade of arduous labour, tracing the origin of the songs and the fate of their authors. This incredible piece of history includes the musical score and translations of the songs.

Music and Holocaust history

Songs are part of Holocaust history. In concentration and death camps, such as Treblinka, Auschwitz and Janowska, the SS forced Jewish inmates to perform songs as a way of mocking and torturing them. The camp orchestras had to play as Jews marched to the backbreaking slave labour, or to their death.

In other contexts, Jewish prisoners in the ghettos, camps or forests performed songs to keep their spirits high and forge a strong collective identity. Others responded to the events they witnessed and composed new songs. Some documented their experience; others paid respect to the memory of their loved ones, murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices.

Many of the songs died with their authors before the end of the war. But others spread around the world during the massive postwar migration of Holocaust survivors, staying hidden among personal belongings – until their discovery decades later.

Eismann, who recorded these songs, was born in 1913 in Lviv (Lemberg), a town now located in Ukraine, though between the world wars it was part of independent Poland. In 1941, the town was occupied by the German army and the Nazis together with Ukrainian nationalists orchestrated a brutal pogrom, killing hundreds of Jewish civilians. Eismann passed through several ghettos and camps, until he assumed a false identity and escaped to Budapest in Hungary. Eventually, in late 1944, he moved to liberated Bucharest. His parents and brother perished.

In Bucharest, Eismann and a small team – including architect Flora Romm, his future wife, and Olga R., who later came to Australia – recorded close to 1,000 protocols with Jewish survivors who passed through the city. They tried to capture their memories of wartime events immediately after the liberation.

Similar initiatives developed across liberated Europe. Survivor activists collected evidence to record the wartime persecution, commemorate those who perished and help bring to justice those who caused their predicament. But the survivors carried more than just their trauma and memory of the persecution.

As Eismann wrote, “as refugees arrive the songs arrive with them”. Testifying and recording the songs helped survivors cope with the trauma of survival. It also returned agency to those who suffered for so long. The book is another proof that the oft-repeated dictum about survivors’ silence early after the war, and their unwillingness to talk about their experiences is inaccurate.

Toltz and Boucher situate Eismann’s efforts in the long tradition of Jewish zemler (collectors): ethnographers who recorded traditional Jewish culture at the time of mass migration and dislocation. The destruction wrought by the Holocaust, however, turned them into “crisis ethnographers”, who captured the lost world and the civilisation the Nazis tried to erase.

The Holocaust as a global event

The story of the authors, composers and performers is also about global migration, Toltz and Boucher suggest.

There is a common belief that Holocaust survivors moved straight from the liberated camps to what is now Israel. In fact, survivors passed through Bucharest on their way from eastern Europe to their new homes overseas. Many of those who passed through Bucharest migrated to other places, including countries in Europe and the Americas.

With them, they carried the trauma of survivor and memory of the Holocaust, including the cultural production that originated during the genocide. When they stopped in Bucharest, Eismann and his team, through their strenuous efforts, captured their memories. The survivors then moved to their new homelands, bringing the story of the Holocaust and their communities to the rest of the world.

The discovery of the songbook in Sydney reminds us that Australia was part of the Holocaust’s geography. Around 27,000 survivors came to Australian shores in the decades after the war. Eismann and Romm settled in Tel Aviv.

‘Death has taken all I love’

Preparing the book, Eismann wanted to offer a holistic perspective on the Jews’ experiences. The survivors came from eastern Europe, where the Jews were the first to experience the deathly part of the Nazi persecution in the summer of 1941. More than 90% of Polish Jews perished.

The narrative arc of Mima’amakim has a redemptive direction, leading us through three sections: despair, hope, and battle and victory. The songs do not shy away from dealing with traumatic experiences of the suffering and death in the ghettos and camps.

In The Third pogrom, the author, Ayzik Flaysher, 13 at the time, wrote:

Brothers shot, my sisters lost, impoverished in the death. Death has taken all I love and left me here to mourn.

Later, the songs turn to themes more familiar from other popular Holocaust songs: Jewish partisans (or, resistance fighters), resistance itself and hope for survival.

Many of the songs originated from Vilna (contemporary Vilnius in Lithuania), where Romm lived. The Jewish partisan groups were active in this area. Their members composed several resistance songs, including the Partisan March:

Comes the hour that we have yearned for, strong and dear. As our footsteps drum the beat: now we are here!

Jewish resistance

The book raises the contentious question of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Some of the songs are directly related to the experiences of Jewish fighters.

The truth is, only a small minority of Jews actively fought against the Nazis and their local collaborators with weapons. But the assumption that the Jews “went like sheep to the slaughter” is based on a wrong premise.

The Jews lived in a hostile environment. They faced a mighty, well-organised army. They knew that once they started fighting, they condemned the weaker of them – women, children, the elderly – to death. That is why a wider definition of resistance is more appropriate.

Some historians promote the concepts of Amidah (standing up against) and sanctification of life. They argue any activity that went against the declared Nazi goals of destroying the Jews, their humanity and any traces of their existence counted as resistance.

This included cultural or education activities in the ghettos and camps that helped to ensure a meaningful Jewish survival. It could be almost any activity that supported other prisoners, kept their spirit high and helped them cope with the persecution. Some of the songs recorded in the book certainly belong to the category.

Many have opposed this wide definition. Already, during the war, some Jewish people opposed cultural activities in the ghettos and camps. They criticised those who staged theatre performances, cabarets or concerts. You do not sing and dance on the graves of millions, they believed. Others saw it as escapism that distracted prisoners from “real” resistance activities, like fighting the Germans and their accomplices with guns.

A task for all of us

The question of resistance is open to interpretation. However, cultural production during the Holocaust, including these songs, ensured the survival of the memory of what happened – and evidence of Jewish responses to persecution. The authors and interpreters behind this book have preserved the humanity of the victims.

Those who composed the songs are no longer with us. The songs remind us about the fate of millions who perished during the Nazi-led genocide. They also carry a deeper meaning now, when the last survivors are dying.

The songs, their authors and those remembered in the lyrics are here to stay. As Toltz and Boucher ask: “Please share the stories of these contributors, sing the music of this book and carry with you their resilience, tenacity and creativity.” This is a task for all of us.

Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW Sydney

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

What does it mean for a hospital to offer “trauma-informed care”? How about a hairdresser? Or even a paint colour consultant?

Suddenly, this term is everywhere, but it’s rarely explained.

Behind the buzzword are decades of evidence about what actually helps people who’ve struggled with experiences of trauma to move on, and what sets their recovery back.

So, who is “trauma-informed care” really for? And what does it look like in practice?

Where did the term come from?

The term “trauma-informed” emerged in the early 2000s, building on clinical research about trauma from the 1990s.

Influential psychiatrist Judith Herman found that people recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) did better when services prioritised their safety, offered choice, and supported their sense of control.

Around the same time, clinicians and traumatised people themselves began documenting a troubling pattern: health and social services were sometimes making things worse, leaving patients more distressed than when they arrived.

This is known as re-traumatisation – when a professional or service unintentionally recreates the conditions of a traumatic experience, triggering the same distress. Placing an adult who experienced childhood neglect in an isolated seclusion room, for example, can evoke the very feelings the original trauma produced.

In the late 1990s, large-scale research, such as a landmark US study, was also revealing that trauma was far more common than previously thought. Just over half of participants reported at least one traumatic event in childhood, including abuse, neglect or family violence, and these experiences were strongly linked to lasting effects on mental and physical health.

Together, this growing body of work helped name and quantify experiences that had often been invisible in health systems. The central question in health care shifted from “what’s wrong with you?” to “what happened to you?”

Everyone seems to be talking about trauma. Do we know more about it? Or has the meaning changed? In this five-part series, we explore the shifting definition of trauma, why talking about it doesn’t always help, and what else can work.

Care that doesn’t cause further harm

Trauma-informed care is not a specific treatment or set of rules.

While individual practitioners can work in a trauma-informed way, the concept is mainly about how organisations or systems – such as a hospital or school – can work with people who’ve experienced trauma. It’s based on evidence about what they need to feel safe.

The starting point is an assumption: any person using your service may have experienced trauma, whether or not they disclose it, and your organisation’s practices could unintentionally make things worse. So trauma-informed care focuses on how to avoid re-traumatisation.

The most widely used framework organises this into “the four R” principles:

• realising how common trauma is
• recognising its signs in clients and staff
• responding through trauma-aware policies and practices
• resisting re-traumatisation, by fostering safety.

What does this look like in practice?

While experiences of trauma can be diverse, evidence suggests six key elements can help people with PTSD avoid re-traumatisation:

• physical and emotional safety: creating environments where people feel secure and in control. For example, not asking people to disclose sensitive information unnecessarily, and allowing people to choose where they sit in a room

• trustworthiness and transparency: being clear about what is happening and why. For example, explaining what is recorded in case notes and who can access them

• choice and empowerment: supporting independence wherever possible. This could mean offering people the choice of what they disclose, and how fast treatment proceeds

• peer support: connecting patients to people with similar experiences and backgrounds. This may include access to peer workers or to information written by people with lived experience about what to expect and what their rights are

• collaboration: viewing patients as equal partners in their care. For example, involving clients in decisions about their goals and treatment options

• cultural humility: recognising the historical and ongoing trauma faced by marginalised communities, addressing staff biases, and tailoring services accordingly. This could mean offering to arrange a clinician from the same cultural background when requested.

Some different scenarios

In health care, trauma-informed care might mean a clinician explains what will happen in an examination before it begins, asks for consent before any physical contact, and offers choices such as having a support person present.

In social services, it might look like intake processes that don’t ask people to repeat traumatic histories already on file, waiting areas designed to feel welcoming, and staff trained to notice distress without escalating it.

In workplaces, it can mean a culture where people feel safe speaking up, and mental health support that is clearly set out in policy.

The risks of this term’s popularity

Interest in the term “trauma-informed” has soared over the past ten years.

This has been driven in part by advocacy organisations that have long pushed services to recognise trauma and prevent harm.

But some services and non-clinical businesses, such as hairdressers or gyms, may use the term simply to signal awareness that trauma exists, without realising that genuine trauma-informed practice requires active, systemic change.

So popularity has its risks.

The key issue is accountability. There is no internationally recognised standard or certification that health workers and organisations are required to meet, and no regulation of who can use the term. It is easy to claim and hard to verify.

This matters because people with trauma histories are vulnerable. If a service promises to meet their needs and fails to, the consequences are real: delayed recovery, worsening symptoms and health, and lost trust in services that could have helped.

Without accountability, the term risks concept drift, diluting what “trauma-informed” actually means and making it harder for people to know whether a service delivers on it.

The bottom line

Greater public awareness of trauma and its long-term effects is a good thing. People with trauma histories don’t only interact with therapists. They navigate welfare systems, workplaces and schools, and reducing re-traumatisation in those settings can make a real difference.

But our concern is that wider use has not consistently translated into improved care or increased clarity for consumers because organisations can use the term without being held to any standard.

For the term to have real value, organisations and practitioners must be able to show – not just claim – how they are meeting trauma-informed principles.

Bronwyn Milkins, Postdoctoral Researcher in Youth Trauma and Dissociation, The Kids Research Institute Australia; Hayley Jackson, Research Fellow in Youth Mental Health, The Kids Research Institute, and Jeneva Ohan, Professor, Healing Kids, Healing Families, The Kids Research Institute Australia

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

You probably know fruit and vegetables are good for you, and most of us don’t eat enough of them.

But amid a cost-of-living crisis, buying more fresh food may not seem like a budget-friendly option.

Enter: canned or frozen fruit and veg.

These are usually cheaper and longer-lasting than fresh produce. But are they as healthy? Let’s unpack the research.

First, how much should we be aiming for?

Fruit and vegetables contain important vitamins, minerals and fibre. These support overall wellbeing and reduce the risk of illnesses, such as heart disease and some cancers.

The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating recommends adults eat at least two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables every day. This includes frozen and canned options.

For example, ½ a cup of frozen broccoli or ½ a cup of canned beans equals one serve of vegetables. One cup of canned peaches or one cup of diced, frozen mango equals one serve of fruit.

Cheap, quick… and low waste?

Most canned and frozen fruits and vegetables are cheaper than fresh produce.

As they generally come pre-chopped and ready to cook, they also cut down on preparation time.

Produce that is canned or frozen also has a much longer shelf life than fresh options. This means they are available year-round, and are less likely to spoil and have to be thrown out.

What about nutrition?

Frozen and canned fruit or veg generally retains its original nutritional value – sometimes better than fresh produce.

For example, the nutritional value of most frozen and canned products is equivalent to fresh fruit and vegetables that have been in the fridge for a week.

But the process of preserving certain foods may actually increase their nutrient content. Apricots are one example, with frozen apricots having a much higher vitamin C content than fresh apricots. This is because vitamin C is used to help preserve the fruit.

Freezing uses low temperatures to delay food spoilage. Industrial freezing methods are effective at retaining the colour and textural qualities of fruit and vegetables, while also maintaining their nutritional content.

However, freezing may damage the structure of food if it causes ice crystals to develop. This can reduce the nutrient content of fruits and vegetables and make them mushy, especially if you thaw and re-freeze them.

Frozen fruits and vegetables are at risk of being contaminated with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes, which can cause food poisoning. But cooking fruits or vegetables before eating them reduces this risk.

The canning process involves sterilising foods at high temperatures so they can be safely stored at room temperature for long periods. However, being exposed to high temperatures causes some nutrients in the food to break down, especially water-soluble vitamins such as vitamin C. But advances in canning technology are allowing the process to be done faster and at lower temperatures, meaning less nutrients are lost.

What to keep an eye on

There are some things to look out for when purchasing canned fruit or vegetables.

Canned vegetables can have a high salt content, so it’s best to choose products that say “no added salt”. You can also check the nutrition information panel and look for options with the lowest sodium content. Draining and rinsing canned veggies before eating them can also help reduce the amount of salt you eat.

For baked beans in sauce, the sauce may contain added sugar and salt. If you eat baked beans regularly, it’s worth finding a salt reduced option to help lower your sodium intake.

To help reduce your sugar consumption, choose canned fruit options that are canned in juice rather than syrup. Some may also say “no added sugar” on the package.

How to use them

Canned fruits can be eaten as a snack on their own, or with cereal or yoghurt. In many recipes you can often replace fresh fruit with frozen and canned options.

Frozen veggies are great for whipping up a quick meal. For example, frozen peas and edamame only need a few minutes to cook, so can be added last-minute to a stir-fry or stew.

Adding a tin of lentils, chickpeas or beans can bulk out a stew or pasta sauce, while boosting your fibre and protein intake. Given they are already cooked, you can also toss them into a salad that will keep you fuller for longer. Just remember to rinse them first.

For more inspiration, here are some recipe collections that revolve around:

• frozen vegetables
• canned beans
• canned fruits and vegetables
• frozen fruits.

What about dried fruit and veg?

Compared to tinned versions, dried beans, chickpeas and lentils – which are all excellent sources of fibre and protein – are even better value and also have a long shelf life. But they can take longer to prepare.

Depending on the product, dried beans, chickpeas and lentils may need soaking prior to cooking or may be ready to add straight to the pot. If in doubt, check the instructions on the back of the packet.

Dried fruits are not recommended as an everyday alternative to fresh, frozen or canned fruit. This is because drying makes them more highly concentrated in sugar. But you can enjoy them as an occasional snack.

Margaret Murray, Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Swinburne University of Technology

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

The first half of 2026 has been marked by three different disease outbreaks: Ebola, hantavirus and, in Australia, diphtheria. Each has exposed vulnerabilities in how we detect, communicate and respond to infectious disease outbreaks.

Each of these outbreaks has its unique challenges. But a common thread has been distrust in health care or a lack of information where misinformation has filled the vacuum.

We’ve seen this play out in different ways across the globe, with devastating results.

So how do we address this distrust so we can better respond to future outbreaks?

Ebola

Distrust, rumours and misinformation have repeatedly emerged as major barriers to controlling Ebola. This includes in the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

For example, past surveys of community members have identified misunderstandings about Ebola (including believing it’s not real), about how people are diagnosed, and revealed low levels of trust in health care.

These issues have hampered how cases of Ebola are identified, discouraged people to seek timely health care or to hide cases, and have undermined public health interventions.

For example, in late May, we heard how some DRC residents set fire to a tent set up by the humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières for suspected and confirmed Ebola cases. This led to 18 people suspected of having Ebola leaving the facility.

The trigger for this and similar examples was the announcement of a ban on large funeral wakes and gatherings. Authorities, rather than families, would now also start to manage the burials of suspected victims due to the infection risk associated with infected bodies, body fluids, contaminated clothing, and other personal items.

In 2014 the World Health Organization developed a safe and dignified burial protocol for local health authorities, in response to past clusters. This stressed the handling of human remains should be kept to a minimum and that cultural and religious concerns must be considered. It also stressed no burial should begin until the family agreed.

For families to accept the safe burial practice, they must both trust the health-care providers implementing the protocols and the institutions directing the response.

This was clearly not the case where the unrest occurred at the Ebola treatment centre, and at another centre where family members tried to retrieve the body of a man suspected of dying of Ebola.

Hantavirus

Misinformation often thrives and spreads where trust is weak and communication is absent. For instance, when transparent public health messaging is delayed, rumours and speculation can quickly fill information vacuums. We’ve seen an example play out with the recent cruise ship hantavirus outbreak.

Several public health experts based in the United States have argued the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was less visible, slower to communicate publicly and less internationally prominent than in previous outbreaks.

At the start of the outbreak top CDC officials didn’t appear on TV shows or give interviews about the risk to the US public. In the past, the agency would often take the lead in coordinating responses to such events.

Instead, others have filled the vacuum, including influencers and others spreading misinformation via social media about the virus’ pandemic potential, unproven treatments, and false links to vaccination.

Diphtheria

The recent diphtheria outbreak in Australia is another example of how information vacuums can undermine an outbreak response.

Warlpiri man Eugene Penhall told Guardian Australia locals were frustrated with the lack of information about diphtheria – including what caused it and how to prevent it. In particular, they wanted information that applied to daily life in a community where housing is overcrowded and living standards are poor.

Here, the challenges are complex, including inequitable access to health care in remote communities, and dealing with a disease many health workers and communities had not encountered for decades.

But unlike an outbreak of hantavirus, diphtheria can be prevented by vaccination. So, if vaccination is to succeed, health authorities need to better target communication about the vaccine and explore ways to enhance local delivery to build and maintain trust.

What can we do to restore trust?

Transparency in a complex outbreak response should acknowledge what is known. That is, it should provide clear explanations for the reasons behind certain decisions. It should also acknowledge what is unknown. That means recognising policy drawbacks or scientific uncertainties.

When we learn more about a disease, public health messages can change and this should be communicated transparently and honestly. It’s not a back-flip. Science evolves and so should public health advice.

From the lessons learnt during past events, such as the COVID pandemic, frequent press conferences, social media updates and direct engagement with the public helps build trust. Different messengers and tailored formats are required for different target audiences.

Upskilling local health staff, working with community-based or civil society organisations, outreach workers, and local leaders can also support successful communication. These groups are likely to be met with less scepticism than “outsiders” such as international public health agencies.

We also need community-driven action, as we’ve seen with the Social Mobilisation Action Consortium in Sierra Leone. This engaged communities to take ownership over preventing Ebola. It resulted in behaviour change around safe burials, early treatment, and social acceptance of Ebola survivors. There were thousands of community mobilisers and trained religious leaders, partnering with more than 30 radio stations. There have not been any Ebola cases in the country since its 2014 outbreak.

But trust can be difficult to establish during a crisis, when emotional and financial stresses are high.

So we also need to proactively build rapport and shared understanding between health-care workers, stakeholders, community organisations and the community before an outbreak.

That way we can identify and address concerns and allow better design, uptake of, and trust in measures to control the next outbreak.

Holly Seale, Professor, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney; Bianca Middleton, Senior Research Fellow, Global and Tropical Health Division, Menzies School of Health Research, and Md Saiful Islam, Lecturer, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney

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

On June 12, artificial intelligence (AI) lab Anthropic suspended access to its latest Claude models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, which had been released three days earlier.

The move came in response to an “export control directive” from the US government prohibiting use of the models by anyone who is not a US national.

Mythos is Anthropic’s most powerful, or “frontier”, model. When first announcing the model in April, the company said it was too good at hacking to release immediately. Instead, Mythos was made available to a handful of organisations (mostly US tech corporations) to use to patch weaknesses in essential digital systems.

Fable is the same basic model, but with added safeguards meant to stop it being used for cybersecurity purposes. This is what was released to the public last week – and almost immediately shut down.

Anthropic and the Trump administration at loggerheads

Since early 2025, Anthropic and the Trump administration have been in escalating conflict. The administration has accused Anthropic of making “woke AI” and called chief executive Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic”.

Early disagreements concerned AI regulation and semiconductor export policy. The dispute sharpened when Anthropic declined to let the Pentagon use its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems.

The Department of Defense responded by threatening to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a classification that would have required military contractors to sever ties.

Jailbreaks

The US government has not yet publicly stated the reason for last week’s directive, but Anthropic it says it believes the government became aware of a jailbreak: a method for circumventing the safeguards in Fable that prevent using its most powerful features for nefarious purposes.

These safeguards classify user requests as safe or unsafe before passing them to the AI model. When triggered, the safeguards redirect the request to a less powerful model.

The government’s concern, according to Anthropic, was that the safeguards could be bypassed to extract information useful for cyberattacks.

Guardrails for large language models aren’t bulletproof. They mostly depend on the model’s own capacity to interpret the user’s intentions in making a request.

Beyond the inherent difficulty of this task, a large online community (which my colleagues and I call the Undersphere) is working hard to circumvent AI guardrails. Anthropic acknowledges that “perfect jailbreak resistance is not achievable for any current model provider”.

Anthropic says the research behind the government directive appears to have been produced by engineers at Amazon, which is both a rival to Anthropic and a significant investor.

But this was not the only relevant jailbreak. Within 48 hours of Fable’s release, a researcher using the pseudonym “Pliny the Liberator” published what they identified as Fable 5’s full system prompt to X and GitHub repository.

The system prompt is a hidden set of instructions that helps determine an AI model’s behaviour. It’s unclear exactly how knowledge of Fable’s system prompt could be used in practice, but it has drawn attention in the Undersphere.

A surprise – and an ongoing mystery

The deepest problem of making large language models such as Fable secure is that we don’t fully know how they work. According to Oxford University economist and machine learning expert Maximilian Kasy, they work much better than they “should”.

Large language models have billions of internal parameters and are trained on unimaginably vast piles of data using machine learning methods. According to Kasy, we would expect such systems to be “overfitted”: good at reproducing patterns in their training data, but bad at generalising to new situations.

However, modern systems such as Claude and ChatGPT do seem to be able to generalise. Kasy likens modern AI development to alchemy: successful through trial and error, not yet grounded in systematic theory.

As a result, the behaviour of AI models is partly opaque even to their builders.

Hard to regulate

The opacity of the technology is one key reason it’s so hard to regulate. Governments lack independent access to the data, infrastructure and expertise they would need to evaluate proprietary frontier models.

The US administration’s recent executive order on AI security, published two weeks ago, reflects this realisation. As the administration has realised the power of frontier AI models, it has moved from an initial hands-off posture to asking developers to share their models for review before release.

That demand is an implicit admission that the administration does not trust the companies to evaluate, fully and comprehensively, what their own models can do and how they might be misused. The public sees even less, and the consequence is measurable: a survey taken across 25 countries last year found people are, on balance, more than twice as concerned about AI as they are excited about it.

The future of AI safety

AI is a hugely hyped technology. But there is no doubt it is also extremely powerful and unpredictable. Understandably, this combination is very dangerous.

We cannot rely on regulations, as technology will develop more quickly than they can adapt. Nor can we rely on guardrails, as they will be bypassed.

We need a governance framework built for that eventuality: one that can predict and address the consequences of failure.

Such a framework must be global, participatory, and founded on reciprocal trust. These are things the current US administration has shown little capacity to generate.

Francesco Bailo, Senior Lecturer in Data Analytics in the Social Sciences, Deputy Director of the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, University of Sydney

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

Sleep can be one of the trickiest things for families with little kids. It’s not just important for parental sanity or a child’s grumpiness levels the next day.

Sleep is crucial for brain development, especially in the early years. We also know getting enough sleep is important for learning and maintaining a healthy weight.

Screen use has been shown to impact the quality and quantity of sleep in adolescents and adults. Our new research closely examines the relationship between sleep and screen-use in young children.

Here’s what we found and what it means for screens in your home.

Our research

We surveyed 3,324 families with children aged six months to six years from across Australia. Caregivers were recruited through social media, flyers and newsletters.

This data is from the first year of a five-year longitudinal study by the Australian Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

Caregivers told us about children’s typical sleep patterns (their bed time, how long they slept, and naps) and any problems.

They also reported on how much time their children spent on screens and on what type of devices (were they handheld like a phone or tablet? Or static like a TV?), and if screens were used in the bedroom. We also asked how often children used screens in the two hours before bed.

What we found

The children in our study were exposed to digital technologies early and often.

Our findings suggest there may be different effects on their sleep, depending on their age, the type of device they use, and when they use it.

For example, fewer than half (between 27% and 44%) of children aged two to five met the national guidelines of less than two hours of screens per day.

This is similar to other studies, showing many parents struggle to limit screen use in everyday family life.

We found use of devices in bedrooms, particularly handheld devices, was occurring from infancy and increased across each age. By age five, almost 40% of children were using handheld devices in their bedrooms.

What about sleep?

For infants (6-12 months), we did not find any significant associations between screen use and sleep. This means screen use may not have as strong of an influence on infant sleep, as other social or biological factors.

However, we suspect passive exposure may be going unmeasured in this age group. For example, if a screen is being used around them by a parent or older sibling.

But things change as children get older:

• for every hour of handheld device use per day, two-year-olds went to bed almost 30 minutes later.

• for every hour of handheld device use per day, three-year-olds not only went to bed later but then slept less overall and showed greater difficulties functioning the following day.

We also found static screens had similar patterns of effects. However, handheld device use was typically stronger and more consistent across each of the ages. But this means both handheld (phones, tablet) and static (TV) devices were associated with less sleep and later sleep timing across most ages.

Evening screen use told a similar story. Children who more frequently used any type of screen in the two hours before bed had shorter sleep, later bedtimes, and more sleep problems across most age groups from one to five years. This is compared with children who had limited or no screen use in the two hours before bed.

What does this tell us?

This study provides unique insights into screen use and sleep in a large sample of Australian children. However, this is what researchers call “cross-sectional” data. It’s only taken at one time-point. So this means we can’t be sure about the cause of these relationships.

For example, this data shows screen use is associated with poor sleep, but it could also be that children who are awake longer have more opportunity to use screens than those who sleep longer.

We will continue to look at this as part of a broader, long-term study of this group. This will help us understand these relationships more clearly across time.

What this means for your family

The good news is these findings point to specific, achievable changes for families that may help their kids’ sleep.

Current screen-use guidelines focus on how much screen time children have. Our findings suggest that where, when, and on what device may also matter. So here are some concrete steps you can take.

1. Remove screens from bedrooms as much as possible. Having screens in bedrooms may lead to longer use times and using screens closer to bedtime. If there are no screens in bedrooms, this may reduce children thinking of their bedrooms as a place for exciting activities. It can also potentially reduce points of friction (for example, taking a device away) in the lead up to bedtime.

2. Create a relaxing pre-bed routine. If you think screens may be interfering with your child’s sleep, consider reducing or replacing screens before bed with activities like play, movement, reading and bath time. Families and children are all different and needs change. But when possible, having a predictable nighttime routine for young children is great for getting children ready to sleep.

3. Limit bright, handheld screens, held close to the face, especially before bed. Light emitted from screens and even our environment can interfere with our sleep promoting hormone, melatonin.

Young children’s sleep is important – for kids and parents. The screens in our homes are not going away, but with some simple adjustments to where and when they are used, families can protect the sleep their children need.

Cassandra Pattinson, Senior Research Fellow, Child Health Research Centre, The University of Queensland

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

Young audiences are engaging with news in growing numbers, and for the first time, Australians under the age of 35 report greater interest in politics than older generations.

The Digital News Report: Australia, a longitudinal study that has been tracking news consumption for more than a decade, shows a shift in how younger generations are accessing and making sense of news.

However, it is not mainstream media they are turning to. Traditional news sources are being bypassed: 60% of people under 25 have never read a newspaper, and more than half (53%) have never listened to news on the radio.

Instead, they encounter news in digital and mobile environments, often incidentally: 71% of under 25s access news on social media and nearly half (48%) of them get news on TikTok. An overwhelming 89% watch news videos via online and social media platforms.

This generational shift is not just about platform choice. It is redefining what news is, who delivers it, and why they are paying for it. News is no longer something people deliberately seek out at set times. It is embedded within everyday scrolling, sharing and entertainment.

This creates a more fluid relationship with news that is driven by algorithms, social networks, and personal interests rather than routines established by mainstream news outlets.

More sources and greater willingness to pay for news

Young Australians under 25 use more news sources than older Australians – and are significantly more likely to pay for it. Around 27% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 41% of those aged 25–34 pay for news, compared with just 16% of 65+.

Again, it is not just traditional media. This younger cohort is driving Australia’s globally highest rate of paying for digital-only news brands.

What motivates this willingness to pay is also different for young people. They are not purchasing content simply for personal use. They are twice as likely as older groups to say they pay for news so others can access news for free, suggesting they see journalism as a social good.

At the same time, they are more likely to subscribe to outlets that align with their views. This reflects a broader shift toward personalised media ecosystems, where individuals curate their own mix of sources that align with their identities and values.

The rise of news influencers

Perhaps the most striking shift is the rise of creators and influencers as a source of news. In Australia, 43% of people say they get news from creators or influencers, slightly above the global average. For 18- to 24-year-olds, this figure jumps to 70%.

People who get news from influencers say influencer-led news is more entertaining (59%), more relatable (55%) and easier to understand (56%) compared to mainstream news. These perceptions are particularly strong among younger audiences.

The growth of influencer-led news is closely tied to questions of trust. Audiences who distrust mainstream media are more likely to turn to influencers. People who distrust news in general are much more likely to perceive influencers as trustworthy (40%) than those who trust mainstream news (32%). Distrusters of news also think influencer-led news is more authentic (61%).

Young people want news to be accessible, flexible and personally relevant. They expect news to meet them where they are – on mobile devices, social media feeds and through voices they trust and relate to.

At the same time, they are wary of the online environment where misinformation proliferates, and seek news sources that are trustworthy. In fact, the proportion of under 35s saying that they trust the news they choose to consume has risen 14 percentage points since 2024 to reach 60%, well above the Australian average of 54%.

This duality presents both opportunities and challenges for the news industry. To remain relevant, legacy news organisations must adapt to new formats and distribution channels without compromising quality.

For media organisations, the task is not simply to attract younger users, but also to understand how their expectations differ.

This means embracing video-first storytelling and recognising the growing role of influencers in the news ecosystem. And, more importantly, acknowledging the significant role that digital platforms such as search, social media and generative AI are playing in the discovery and consumption of news.

Digital News Report: Australia is produced by the News & Media Research Centre (N&MRC) at the University of Canberra and is part of a global annual survey of digital news consumption in 48 countries, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. The survey was conducted by YouGov at the end of January/beginning of February 2026.

Sora Park, Professor of Communication, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra; Janet Fulton, Research Fellow, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra; Jee Young Lee, Lecturer, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra, and Kieran McGuinness, Postdoctoral Fellow, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra

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

You go to hospital for treatment and to get better. But sometimes, you get something much less welcome: an infection.

Pneumonia, an infection of the lungs, is one of the most common and deadly infections people develop in hospital. Around 50,000 patients contract pneumonia in Australian hospitals every year. Around 1,900 of them die from it.

It’s rarely monitored and rarely reported. And to date, few studies have looked at how it can be prevented.

But our new trial, published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, shows a surprisingly simple action can make a major difference: brushing patients’ teeth.

We found this can reduce the chance of getting this type of pneumonia, called non-ventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia, by 60%.

What is this type of pneumonia?

Non-ventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia occurs in patients who aren’t on a ventilator, usually outside of intensive care settings.

Patients are infected when bacteria from the mouth or throat are breathed into the lungs.

Patients who develop this type of pneumonia stay in hospital between ten and 48 days longer, and are around eight times more likely to die during their admission.

A simple intervention made a big difference

We studied 8,870 patients across three Australian hospitals to see whether improving oral care – which included tooth-brushing – could reduce this type of pneumonia.

Usually, when patients go to hospital, they don’t pack a toothbrush – especially in emergencies.

In busy hospital wards, oral care isn’t always given the attention it needs, nor are oral care products always readily available. Patients don’t always get reminders to brush their teeth and many patients need help with their oral care.

The intervention in our study was deliberately simple. We:

• gave patients in hospital a toothbrush and toothpaste in a bag when they were admitted

• educated patients and hospital staff about the importance of tooth-brushing. The toothbrush also had a written prompt on it – “Brush away pneumonia”

• assisted patients who needed help with tooth-brushing

• audited how oral care was being delivered and gave feedback to hospital wards.

We introduced the intervention into one ward at a time over 12 months at each hospital. This gradual roll-out is known as a stepped-wedge cluster randomised trial. It can test new health interventions when it’s too difficult to randomise individuals without revealing who is receiving the intervention and who isn’t.

We found that this relatively simple intervention increased the proportion of people who cleaned their teeth from 16% to 62%.

This increasing oral care led to a 60% reduction in the risk of acquiring pneumonia, from the equivalent of eight infections per month on a typical ward of 30 patients, to less than four infections per month.

This is the largest trial of its kind and the first completed across multiple hospitals.

Why does brushing teeth help?

The mouth is home to billions of bacteria. Oral hygiene often deteriorates when people are unwell, sedated, immobile, or taking certain medications.

When this happens, bacteria build up on the teeth, gums and tongue. If these bacteria are breathed in – even in tiny amounts – they can cause pneumonia.

Daily tooth-brushing reduces this bacteria. It’s a simple mechanical action with a powerful protective effect.

Yet in busy hospitals, oral care is often overlooked. Patients may not know just how important oral care is. Staff are often busy with competing priorities and oral care can be de-prioritised. There is also a general lack of understanding about the importance of oral care.

Patients can help protect themselves

One of the most important messages from our research is patients aren’t powerless. While health-care staff such as nurses play a crucial role, patients who are able to brush their own teeth can meaningfully reduce their own risk.

If you or a loved one is admitted to hospital, you can:

• bring your own toothbrush and toothpaste
• brush your teeth twice a day if you’re able
• ask staff for help if you can’t
• remind staff if oral care has been missed.

These small actions can reduce the risk of a serious, life-threatening infection.

What happens next?

Pneumonia is costly – in lives, hospital days and the financial cost of care. But because non-ventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia isn’t routinely reported, it’s often invisible.

Our research challenges the assumption that hospital-acquired pneumonia is an unavoidable complication when you go to hospital.

It also highlights the need for hospitals to monitor non-ventilator hospital-acquired infections, in the same way they monitor falls, pressure injuries and other preventable harms.

Finally, our study strengthens the case for including oral care in national infection-prevention guidelines and nursing practice.

Oral care isn’t glamorous, expensive or technologically advanced – but it works. Sometimes, the simplest interventions are the most powerful.

Brett Mitchell, Professor of Nursing and Health Services Research, University of Newcastle; Allen Cheng, Professor of Infectious Diseases, Monash University; Nicole White, Associate Professor of Statistics, Queensland University of Technology; Peta Ellen Tehan, Senior Lecturer, Monas University, Monash University, and Philip Russo, Professor, Director of Research, Nursing and Midwifery, Monash University

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

Magic mushrooms are better known for producing hallucinations and altering people’s sense of reality than for treating brain diseases. Most people associate them with tripping, rather than Alzheimer’s disease.

But a report on an individual patient has prompted scientists to ask whether psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, could have unexpected effects on the ageing brain.

The report describes changes observed in a Japanese-American woman in her 80s with advanced Alzheimer’s disease after she received psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Dementia is a broad term for symptoms that affect memory, thinking and everyday independence. Alzheimer’s disease is its most common cause.

The woman had experienced progressive decline for a decade. For the previous five years, she had largely communicated using single words and relied heavily on others for everyday care. She also had difficulty walking and dressing herself and experienced chronic urinary incontinence.

She received 5g of psilocybin-containing mushrooms. The exact amount of psilocybin is unclear because mushroom potency varies. During the experience, she sweated heavily and entered a prolonged sleep-like state. Around 19 hours later, she began speaking spontaneously and recalling memories from her own life.

Over the following days and weeks, caregivers reported that she seemed more alert, recognised family members, walked more independently, began dressing herself and regained urinary continence. One month later, she received a second supervised session involving 3g of mushrooms and again appeared more expressive and agile.

The case has drawn comparisons with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s 1973 book Awakenings, which described patients who unexpectedly regained lost abilities after treatment with the Parkinson’s drug L-dopa, also known as levodopa. The diseases and drugs are entirely different. Both raise questions about how much function may remain hidden within a damaged brain.

However, the report does not show that psychedelics reverse Alzheimer’s disease.

It involved one person, rather than a controlled clinical trial. Her diagnosis was based on her clinical history, rather than confirmed using biomarkers: biological signs of Alzheimer’s disease that can be detected using tests such as brain scans or analysis of spinal fluid. There was no comparison group and no standardised testing of memory and thinking before and after treatment. Observations were largely based on reports from caregivers and family members.

Alzheimer’s disease involves abnormal proteins, inflammation, damage to connections between brain cells and, ultimately, the death of neurons, or nerve cells. There is no evidence that psilocybin reversed these underlying disease processes.

The authors suggest that psilocybin may temporarily have altered communication between surviving brain networks: groups of brain regions that work together. This could have made some abilities more accessible for a limited period. Because the report did not include brain scans, this remains an untested hypothesis.

Scientists are interested in this possibility partly because of the brain’s ability to adapt.

For much of the 20th century, scientists believed that the adult brain was relatively fixed. It is now known that the brain can reorganise itself throughout life. New connections can form and networks can change in response to experience.

This process, known as neuroplasticity, supports learning, memory and recovery from injury. It generally becomes less efficient with ageing and dementia.

Psilocybin acts mainly through a serotonin receptor called 5-HT2A. Serotonin is a chemical messenger involved in mood, perception and other functions. Receptors are proteins that allow cells to respond to chemical signals.

Studies in animals suggest that psilocybin can encourage the formation of dendritic spines: tiny protrusions on nerve cells that help them communicate. Psychedelics may also affect signalling pathways involving brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein involved in maintaining nerve-cell connections.

Brain-imaging studies suggest that psilocybin temporarily changes communication between large-scale brain networks. Some networks become less rigidly separated, while familiar patterns of activity are disrupted.

Over the past decade, clinical trials have produced promising results in depression. Smaller studies have also examined psilocybin-assisted therapy for anxiety and some forms of addiction.

Other research has explored possible anti-inflammatory effects. This is relevant because chronic inflammation is thought to contribute to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders: conditions in which nerve cells gradually become damaged or die.

Laboratory and animal research therefore suggests that psychedelics may influence nerve-cell growth, inflammation and brain-network activity. Whether these effects occur in people with Alzheimer’s disease remains unknown.

Separate research at the University of California, Berkeley, is examining how psilocybin affects cognitively healthy adults aged 60 to 85. The study is not testing a dementia treatment. Participants will receive synthetic psilocybin and undergo brain scans and tests of memory and thinking.

There are important reasons for caution.

Psilocybin is not risk-free. Psychedelic experiences can be frightening and disorienting, particularly for vulnerable people. Older adults may face increased risks of falls, heart and circulation problems and interactions with medications.

The woman experienced heavy sweating, suspected high body temperature and a prolonged sleep-like state. The absence of lasting complications does not establish that the approach is safe.

It would be dangerous to interpret the report as a reason to experiment with psychedelic mushrooms outside a closely supervised research or clinical setting.

The case raises a possibility: even after years of severe cognitive decline, some abilities may remain temporarily accessible. Whether psilocybin played a direct role, how it might have done so and whether similar effects could be reproduced in other people remain unknown. Answering those questions will require controlled research.

Rahul Sidhu, PhD Candidate, Neuroscience, University of Sheffield

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

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is one of the most watched events of the international sports calendar, and fans from across the globe will be trying to predict how far their team will go.

I’m a data scientist and in an attempt to forecast the eventual tournament winner, semi-finalists and teams’ chances of progressing through the group stages, I built a model to predict how the World Cup may unfold.

Here’s how I did it and what my model predicted.

Lessons from recent history

For this World Cup, the traditional 32-team tournament structure (eight groups of four) has been expanded to a bulging 48 teams (12 groups of four), with new progression rules, an extra knock-out round and a rise in total matches from 64 to 104.

The changes were designed by FIFA primarily to increase global participation, maximise revenue through more matches and boost the popularity of soccer in new markets.

In trying to predict the 2026 event, what can recent history teach us?

Looking back to the seven 32-team tournaments since 1998, the 28 semi-final spots have been dominated by six nations who reached that stage more than once: Argentina (2), the Netherlands (3), Brazil (3), Croatia (3), France (4) and Germany (4).

If we include previous tournament winners (England, Italy and Spain), 78.6% of the modern semi-finalists have come from nine nations.

Further, all 14 finalists were from this group – the last finalist from outside these nine came in 1962 (Czechoslovakia); the last winner was in 1950 (Uruguay).

This is an amazing degree of dominance given the number of international teams playing the game – official FIFA rankings currently list 211 nations.

More teams at the 2026 event, though, means it is harder to accurately assess the likelihood of tournament results.

For this, we need analytics, and I’ve undertaken a simulation study designed to calculate the progression chances of all 48 teams in the field.

While the obvious outcome of such a study is to assess who the likely winners are, we can also gain insight from how the new format spreads these chances across the teams and how it affects the chances of the top sides raising the trophy.

What did it predict?

Each team’s chances of reaching each round, based on one million simulations, are shown in the below table.

It predicts Australia is a 67.1% chance of getting out of their group, a 31.3% chance of getting past their first knock-out match, but is just a 1.0% chance of making the final and 0.3% chance of winning.

Canada’s chances are quite similar: a 78.9% chance of making out of their group (thanks to being a host nation), a 37.9% chance of getting past their first knock-out but just a 1.0% chance of making the final and 0.3% chance of winning.

New Zealand, on the other hand, has basically no chance of winning and only a 19.5% chance of making it out of their group.

Lastly, while England has the fourth highest overall chance of winning, it is notably lower than the other three favourites. This is at least in part due to their recent drop in rating after a loss to Japan in March.

The only teams with more than 10% chance of winning the trophy are Spain (15.8%), France (15.6%), Argentina (15.3%) and England (11.0%) – all members of the “group of nine” and the current top four rated sides.

But the estimated proportion of semi-final spots taken by these nine nations is 54.2% – notably lower than the historical 78.6%.

Further, the estimated proportion of finalists to come from these nine nations is 63.6%, while there is a 72.6% chance the champion comes from this group, both down from the historical 100% values. Of course, this is partly due to Italy’s failure to make the World Cup.

So, FIFA’s new format does reduce the chances of the historically strong nations progressing far into the tournament but not as much as they may have hoped.

Had FIFA increased the size of the groups to six teams, instead of increasing the number of groups, the new format would have done more to spread the chances – but doing so would have required at least 136 matches.

I would like to thank Dr Chris Bilson and Noah Stern for their help in producing this article. In addition, I would like to thank a very careful reviewer for important comments.

Steven Stern, Professor of Data Science, Bond University

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

If I say the word “hobby”, you’ll likely think of something you like to do in your spare time – gardening, walking, reading, knitting, model kits. Maybe it’s pottery classes, DIY projects or learning something new on YouTube. But what you may not know is many hobbies were originally forms of work that evolved into something to do in our spare time as manufacturing practices changed.

Crafts are one type of hobby that have always been popular. Many, like lacemaking, were originally jobs that women and children did, and some, like tablet weaving, have long histories that can be traced back to the bronze age.

In the UK, the Heritage Association advocates for traditional craft skills and supports makers. One of their roles is to monitor the risk of a craft becoming extinct in the UK through their red list. Many crafts they list are professions; however, there are some that are now thought of as hobbies as well.

Here are three crafts that are at risk of becoming extinct in the UK. Maybe one will pique your interest. If so, why not give it a go – you might even help keep a traditional skill alive.

Hobbies can bring joy, wellbeing and focus to our busy lives, but so many of us don’t have one. If you’re ready to replace scrolling with stitching, or hustle with horticulture, The Hobby Starter Kit (a new series from Quarter Life) will help you get going.

1. Nålbinding

Also called naalbinding, nalebinding and needlebinding, nålbinding is a looping technique used to create textiles without using knots. It’s similar to crochet or knitting but much older. The earliest known example dates back to the Neolithic period, around 5,000 years ago.

Examples of nålbinding have been found all over the world. There are over 200 different types of stitch, often associated with specific places or cultures. Many surviving examples in Britain come from Viking contexts. The Coppergate sock is the most famous. Discovered in York, it dates to around the tenth century.

Nålbinding is still popular in Scandinavia. However, in the UK it is only worked by a small number of enthusiasts. Nålbinding is relaxing craft and a good way of using up left over yarn from other wool crafts. You can make not only socks but hats, gloves, mittens and other accessories, from traditional pieces to modern designs.

If you are interested in learning more, check out the work of nålbinding expert and archaeologist Emma Boast.

2. Lacemaking

Lacemaking, often called bobbin lace to distinguish it from machine lace, requires a pillow, bobbins, thread (normally cotton), a pricking (the pattern) and pins.

The bobbins are worked in pairs and each pair is wound with thread. The pattern is drawn onto card that is pinned onto the pillow. The wound bobbins are hung in a set sequence at the top of the pattern and they are moved, interlacing and knotting the thread in particular ways. Patterns can range from the very simple to hugely complex.

Lace was popular during the 19th century. Queen Victoria was very keen on Honiton lace and had her wedding dress and veil made from it. Because it was handmade, lace was expensive, but this changed with the introduction and development of machine lace, much of which was made in Nottingham.

Bobbin lace is known around the world, but Bruges in Belgium and Malta are perhaps the best-known centres. It is thought to have arrived in the UK in the 16th century from either Flanders or Italy and became a way for women and children to earn money. Over time different techniques developed, many of which used to be practised in specific geographical areas. Honiton lace, for example, was made primarily in the English town in Devon and surrounding area of the same name.

There is also Bucks point and Bedfordshire, known a “midland laces”, which use midland-style bobbins. These have beads (spangles) to weigh them down and can be very elaborate pieces of art in their own right.

Lacemakers may have important celebrations engraved onto specific bobbins and there is much cultural history about otherwise unknown people memorialised in them. However, the technique that most people start with is Torchen, which uses midland bobbins to create geometric patterns.

Today, bobbin lace is championed by The Lace Guild and a small community of enthusiasts, who run workshops and give advice. The Lace Guild also has branches around the country welcoming starters and more experienced lace makers alike. If you are interested in learning more, The Lace Guild is a good place to start. You can also buy starter kits that you can expand as you develop your interest.

3. Straw working

Traditional straw working has been used for centuries. It is a plaiting technique that can make straw toys, accessories such as hats and baskets and straw marquetry – decorative designs used on furniture and objects. Today, straw making is primarily used to make ornaments for thatch roofs, with only 50 professionals and around 100 crafters remaining.

However, there are types of straw work more suitable for crafting. Straw plaiting has regional varieties of plait patterns that can be worked into ribbons, hats, baskets and other decorations. Corn dollies – decorative figures originally called harvest trophies – also have many regional variations that cover shape, size and type of plait or knot.

The Straw Craftsmen group promotes this craft in its many forms. If you are interested in exploring straw making more, their website has blogs, suppliers and other information. If you want to give it a go, independent craft shops sell starter kits and some crafting websites have free online step-by-step instructions.

As a textile archaeologist interested in traditional crafts and material culture, these three endangered hobbies particularly fascinate me. They are also relatively easy to try. Even if none of these become your long-term hobby, trying one might spark a new creative interest – and help keep these traditional skills alive for the future.

Alexandra Makin, Third Century Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University

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

From the air, you see it only through the constant jolt, tilt and shudder of the low-flying Cessna aircraft. The landscape of the Llanos de Moxos, northern Bolivia, appears as a disconnected patchwork of open grassland savannahs, forest islands and lakes.

It feels random, almost unreadable. Only gradually does the pattern resolve itself: raised causeways or paths fanning out to link the forest islands, and a dense, scattered web of canals threading the terrain. Slowly you realise it’s a structured network of intersecting lines, enclosures and roads – the imprint of past human design.

If you stand on the open savannah, there is almost nothing to see of this ancient network. The horizon feels open, with fires in the distance from local people burning pastures and clearing forest as dry season begins. The old geometry is still faintly perceptible, but you have to know how to look.

Step into the patches of forest and the canopy closes in. The earth softens underfoot and mosquitoes descend in relentless swarms. The sweat on your neck thickens into a humid film, carrying the familiar scent of suncream and the sharper, chemical note of DEET.

In the uneven light between the trees, the landscape dissolves into subtle rises and depressions. Against the rhythmic swish of machetes as our guides cut through the vegetation, your mind tries to piece together the fragments of structures into something coherent. Flying overhead doesn’t reveal anything about this forest area in the way that it does with the savannah. But fortunately recent advances in technology have transformed what we are able to see.

Archaeological explorations in this part of the world have been completely changed by lidar in the past couple of decades. Lidar maps an area from a plane or drone by bouncing rapid laser pulses off the Earth’s surface. Some of these pulses penetrate the forest canopy, reach the ground and reflect back to the sensor.

By measuring the return time, the system can generate highly precise three-dimensional models of the terrain. This allows you to strip away the camouflage of vegetation, making it possible to see what lies below the Amazonian forest for the first time.

It reveals the ancient Llanos de Moxos as not simply a collection of settlements, but an entire urbanised landscape. A large part in the south-east of this region belonged to the Casarabe culture, which dominated between around AD500 and 1400. It extends across 20,000km², which is roughly the size of New Jersey in the US.

The Casarabe organised into a hierarchy of four different sizes of settlements (those forest islands mentioned above). The biggest ones – the primary settlements – were as large as 3km² or 300 hectares. That’s enough space for over 400 football pitches, suggesting that they could have accommodated substantial numbers of people.

These settlements connect along the raised causeways to smaller secondary and tertiary sites a number of kilometres away, all of which were permanently inhabited as opposed to empty ceremonial hubs. A fourth tier consists of groups of isolated mounds located out in the pampas, which likely correspond to dwelling areas occupied by farmers who would have worked the fields.

It’s not possible to show a lidar image of these four different types of sites interconnecting because they are too far apart for the resolution available, but the image below of a primary settlement known as Loma Cotoca shows the kinds of things we are now documenting.

It features some very impressive civic-ceremonial architecture: conical pyramids over 20 metres tall and U-shaped structures that may have acted as areas for public gatherings for speeches or ceremonies. These were built on top of man-made platforms rising as much as five metres off the ground and extending over 20 hectares. To be clear, this is all still hiding under the forest, but the lidar data reveals the shape, height and layout of what lies below.

The volume of earth moved to create this architecture would have rivalled – and in some cases exceeded – that of well known Andean monuments such as Akapana a few hundred miles to the south-west on the other side of the Andes. Akapana was the epicentre of the Tiwanaku empire that dominated the southern Andes between about AD600 and 1000.

Yet where monuments like Akapana were surrounded by classic, compact bounded cities with thousands of inhabitants, the Casarabe equivalent was completely different. This was dispersed, low-density living amid extensive green space – a form of tropical urbanism that challenges longstanding assumptions about this area as sparsely populated and only lightly modified. It invites comparison with other low-density tropical urban landscapes such as the Maya in central America and the Angkor in latter day Cambodia.

Equally important is the coherence of the Casarabe system. The settlements are rarely isolated, part of a tightly connected network with shared water-management systems. It was clearly all planned and coordinated, designed not only as living spaces but for integrating the population across the region.

We can see that the Casarabe were sustained by drained-field agriculture: the canals were dug to make the land viable for planting during the wet season. The most prominent crop was maize, but there was a remarkable diversity of other produce. This was all embedded within a landscape that was engineered through reservoirs and farm ponds, which helped the Casarabe sustain cultivation and maintain access to water through the dry season in this extremely seasonal environment.

Also very noticeable is the fact that all the major architectural features and burial sites are oriented north-north-west. This suggests these people may have been led by cosmology, with important celestial bodies or regions of the night sky serving as symbolic reference points – hinting at a world where infrastructure, settlement and belief were inseparable.

Rethinking the Amazon

The Casarabe culture covered much less than 1% of Amazonia, which is the whole tropical interior of South America, spanning close to half of the entire continent. For much of the 20th century, this vast area was viewed by archaeologists as an environment that was limiting for human existence.

Poor soils, scarce game, extreme El Niño floods and droughts, and the challenges of tropical disease were all thought to constrain human populations to small, wandering groups living off the land as best they could. Large, settled societies – let alone towns or cities – were considered unlikely, if not impossible.

This view began to shift in the late 20th century for several reasons. Archaeologists realised that Amazonian people had been domesticating a diversity of plants since the end of the Ice Age. They manufactured some of the earliest ceramics in the Americas, and also devised soils known as Amazonian Dark Earths, which combined charcoal, bone and waste materials with the existing poor-quality soil to make it fertile enough for widespread farming.

It also became apparent that just like the Casarabe people, many other cultures across Amazonia had reclaimed vast expanses of seasonally flooded savannahs over several thousand years to create raised and drained field systems.

These discoveries were evidence of long-term settlement and landscape management far beyond what was previously thought possible. It meant Amazonia was not simply a backdrop to human activity; much of the landscape was shaped over the last 13 millennia by the people who lived there.

Enter lidar

Like lasers in the sky, lidar technology has accelerated this transformation in our understanding. The digital process feels near-magical, a “vegetation removal algorithm” that reveals the secrets below.

In practice, however, working with lidar in Amazonia is anything but straightforward. Running such a project here, as I have done, can feel like one of the greatest emotional rollercoasters in field archaeology. It’s all anticipation, frustration and sudden revelation – only comparable, perhaps, with shipwreck exploration.

Depending on what technology is available and most suitable for exploring a particular area, I’ve worked with lidar attached to drones, aeroplanes and helicopters. I’ve learned through trial and error that the technology is only as effective as the logistics and personalities behind it – above all on one occasion when we were trying to integrate a Hungarian lidar sensor with a Brazilian drone.

Lidar can perform beautifully one day and fail the next, depending on the equipment, weather, terrain, batteries, communications and the sheer difficulty of operating in remote Amazonian conditions.

Flights must be carefully planned in remote areas with limited infrastructure, where convective clouds, smoke from fires, wind and even vultures riding thermals can disrupt data acquisition. You have to arrange fuel in advance and improvise landings wherever a safe clearing can be found. Here’s our team refuelling a lidar helicopter in the football field of a small village in Acre state, western Brazil:

You also have to do constant troubleshooting with the technology, such as making sure it’s calibrated correctly and that the data from different flight paths all aligns. What appears in the final images as a seamless “removal” of the forest is, in reality, the product of improvisation, negotiation and persistence.

But given all these challenges, it makes the first successful images all the more powerful when they finally appear. The reward is that we’re finally finding the “lost civilisation” that explorers like Percy Fawcett were searching for a century ago, but by cajoling a drone rather than battering through jungle.

Incidentally, this technology also has important uses beyond archaeology. It can help people to locate and harvest crops like rubber or açaí palm fruits without having to clear so much rainforest. It is also used by pioneering projects such as Amazonia Revelada, which helps Indigenous and traditional people of the Amazon to prove their historic presence within an area to ward off modern commercial interests like loggers or farmers, while also protecting the living history and nature embedded in these landscapes.

Other lidar discoveries

Lidar surveys by French and Ecuadorian archaeologists have revealed that the Llanos de Moxos was certainly not the only example of large-scale, highly integrated society in Amazonia. The Upano Valley, which covers some 300-600km² on the mountainous forest of the Ecuadorian eastern flanks of the Andes, offers another striking example – this time from between about 500BC and AD600–700.

Lidar discovery areas

In Upano, archaeologists have been able to map a vast network of settlements connected by extensive road systems, with large platforms and clusters of buildings arranged in organised layouts across a broad area.

What stands out is not just the scale – thousands of structures – but the rigour of the planning. The settlements didn’t just grow randomly, but as part of a deliberate design: we see straight lines of flat-topped platforms laid out in repeating rows and connected by straight paths that cut cleanly across the landscape, as you can see below.

Again, this is not urbanism in the conventional sense of dense, continuous occupation. There would have been none of the vertical stacking of buildings that you’d get in European settlements, and there were also green spaces between platform complexes – much more like a forest city.

Like the Casarabe region, this is a distributed settlement pattern that is both open and highly structured, but the arrangement is much more compact. This reflects the limited flat space available on the upper terraces of the Upano River, which rise up to 100 metres above the surrounding landscape.

Elsewhere in Amazonia, we see more variations. In the Upper Xingu of central Brazil, interconnected settlements were arranged around a shared ceremonial and road network, again suggesting a regionally coordinated social world.

Further north, the Tairona people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in present-day Colombia built terraced stone towns in the mountains, linked by paved paths. This was a form of urbanism shaped entirely by the demands of steep, high-altitude terrain. Below is a lidar image of one area in this region, with the platforms that would have housed the settlements marked in yellow. Below that, you can see what the platforms look like.

In western Amazonia, Acre adds another important variation. From around AD1–1000, people built large ditched enclosures, or geoglyphs, mainly in the south-eastern part of this region along the upper Purus River. These were square, circular, hexagonal or octagonal mounds, often 1-3 hectares in size, with ditches up to four metres deep. These were probably used as ceremonial gathering places rather than permanent settlements.

After about AD1000, these were followed by what we call circular mound villages, occupied until around AD 1650–1700. They featured rings of mounds around central plazas and straight roads radiating out like the rays of the Sun, often built to align with the four main compass points. These “Sun villages” were true settlements, and formed interconnected networks across the southern rim of Amazonia. You can see an example in the lidar image below.

Taken together, these discoveries fundamentally reshape our understanding of Amazonia. We now see a mosaic of managed landscapes, engineered environments and, in some cases, city-scale societies. What unites them is not a shared blueprint but a shared impulse: the organisation of people, space and movement across large landscapes in ways that were deliberate, durable and distinctly their own.

To stress, Amazonia was not uniformly dense or urban. It supported a diversity of types of settlements, from dispersed networks like Moxos to tighter grids like Upano, each of them adapted to local ecological conditions. They shared a low-density urbanism, in the sense of large, interconnected populations without the density of classic cities.

What we still don’t know

How were these societies organised politically and socially? How did they interact with variations in the climate and environment, ranging from the heavy rainfalls and droughts caused by El Niño to rivers forging new routes that could move them away from a settlement within a few generations?

What, if any, connections existed with mountain societies in the Andes? And perhaps most importantly, since both the Casarabe and Upano ceased to build monuments after 1492, what led to their transformation or decline before the arrival of Europeans?

There is active debate between archaeologists over whether these societies transformed because of environmental stress, internal political change, or shifts in things like trade routes or migration.

In the Llanos de Moxos, one possibility is that a prolonged period of climate change affected the Casarabe water-management systems that were so critical to feeding this thriving society. In the Upano Valley, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes may have disrupted settlements and agriculture, although it’s unclear whether that could have led to the area being abandoned.

It seems likely that as we uncover new things, it will reveal more and more integration between different societies. What we are seeing now in Amazonia is much like looking at a satellite image of a country at night: bright, isolated clusters of light – cities that appear disconnected. But as we continue to expand our coverage and fill in the gaps, I think this will change.

What now appear as isolated clusters may also resolve into extensive networks. For example a study across the southern rim of Amazonia has predicted that the kinds of settlement mounds that have been identified so far are likely to occur across about 400,000km², supporting an estimated regional population of roughly 500,000 to 1 million people in the era before the Europeans arrived.

Entire regions may emerge as previously unrecognised centres of population and landscape management. This could be particularly so for the Llanos de Moxos. The whole area covers as much as 200,000km², depending on where you draw the boundaries, stretching into Brazil and even Peru. It is often divided into several apparently distinct cultural regions — the Casarabe (aka the monumental mound region), and then two others called the platform ridge and zanjas (ditches) regions.

As lidar coverage expands and more archaeological work is conducted, we may begin to understand how these societies were economically specialised. We know, for example, that the fortified villages of the zanjas region had fish weirs spanning hundreds of miles that were capable of capturing vast quantities of migratory fish. The platform ridge region consisted of large drained fields, which could potentially produce surpluses of maize. It is conceivable that these belonged to a broader network that supported the more complex Casarabe centres.

Or perhaps – who knows – the relationships were more fluid and reciprocal. For now, the question remains open. But it is precisely this possibility of deep regional integration that lidar is beginning to bring into view. In time, we may even begin to identify Casarabe outposts scattered across the Llanos de Moxos.

What happens next

There’s still a huge amount to be done with lidar. Vast areas, particularly in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon – remain unexplored. One recent study suggested that there could be more than 10,000 more urban structures of the kind I’ve been describing still hidden throughout Amazonia, all of them dating from pre-European times.

Looking ahead 20 years, it is likely that our map of Amazonia will look very different. One promising technology is satellite-based lidar systems, which could provide broader, though less detailed, datasets across large areas. Advances in machine learning are also beginning to help us identify archaeological features within massive datasets, speeding up a labour-intensive process.

Against this, there are time pressures in some places. Llanos de Moxos, for instance, is unfortunately in rapid transition. The very ground that holds the traces of ancient networks is being transformed by mechanised agriculture and large-scale terraforming for rice cultivation and pastures.

We also need to keep reminding ourselves that lidar is only the first step. What really matters is how it’s brought together with other lines of evidence. Most sites discovered by lidar have yet to be excavated, so we’ll have to do much of that, looking for everything from bones and plants to ceramics and weapons.

So far, most excavation has been in the Casarabe area of the Llanos de Moxos. The reason, for instance, that we know the culture lived primarily on maize was through the discovery of over 60 human skeletons, which underwent carbon isotope analysis. The same research paper also analysed excavated duck bones to show that the Casarabe were feeding them maize too, suggesting animal domestication in a continent that was not generally known for it.

Another fascinating Casarabe find is a single buried skeleton who may have been a leader, because he had a collar of jaguar teeth around his neck. He was also wearing ear pieces made of armadillo shell, studded with mottled blue stones called sodalite – it’s not clear what these were for.

We’ll also need to obtain more precise dates for key events using techniques like radiocarbon dating, and more pinpoint accurate environmental data to help support theories about ancient changes to the climate – as opposed to the wider regional information we’ve tended to rely on until now. Lake sediments are great environmental archives, preserving evidence of things like vegetation change and landscape disturbance.

Also important is comparing genetic data from excavated bones with people who live in these areas today – in dialogue and collaboration with local communities whose histories, memories and knowledge are essential to understanding these landscapes.

It’s all a question of how lidar is brought together with all this other evidence. The most convincing reconstructions will come from the convergence of all of these. One further major challenge ahead, however, will be to bridge the gap between scientific reconstructions and how past peoples understood and inhabited their world. Archaeology is increasingly rich in data, but we have to relate it to lived experience.

That is no easy feat, but it is essential if we are to move from mapping past worlds to understanding them. Crucially, Amazonia – with its rich, still-vibrant Indigenous societies and ethnographic record – offers an exceptional opportunity to do this, providing rare continuities through which to anchor and critically engage our interpretations of the past.

Lessons for today

My own sense is that we will move towards a view of Amazonia not as an exception, in line with the old view that the people lived within an untouched paradise, but as part of a broader pattern of human-environment interaction. The rainforest will be understood not only as a biological system, but as a historical one – shaped, in part, by the people who lived within it.

This does not mean the Amazonian people who simply lived “in harmony” with nature; the evidence points to something more interesting. Although Amazonian societies developed complex, and at times intensive, forms of land use, the evidence consistently shows that they often did so while maintaining continuous forest cover. Far from the large-scale deforestation that we might assume was necessary for such elaborate forms of human life, their practices created mosaics of managed forest, gardens, orchards, wetlands and settlement areas.

We know partly from lake sediment data that people enriched the forests with species that provided food, building materials, medicines and other resources, from açaí and cacao to palms, cinchona and copaiba. The fact that some of these species endure today suggests that past land use left lasting ecological legacies.

In the context of today’s climate crisis, the long-term balance that these people achieved offers a powerful lesson: it is possible to sustain complex societies without destroying the forest, if land use is guided by principles that integrate ecological knowledge, cultural values and a commitment to the continuity of the living landscape.

What lies beneath the Amazon is not just a hidden past. It is a reminder that even the most seemingly untouched landscapes can carry deep histories, waiting – sometimes just beneath our feet – to be revealed.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack

• ‘People think you come out … and live happily ever after. If only.’ The reality of life after wrongful conviction

• The grief myth: it doesn’t come in stages or follow a checklist – like love, it endures

• Inside Porton Down: what I learned during three years at the UK’s most secretive chemical weapons laboratory

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

José Iriarte, Professor of Archaeology, University of Exeter

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

Americans typically commemorate the nation’s birthday with hot dogs and hamburgers.

Instead, I think we should mark the 250th anniversary of the United States with a hearty bowl of pepper pot stew.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, pepper pot stew was a popular street food. A dish of Afro-Caribbean origin, it was typically made with tripe and other cheap cuts of meat mixed with vegetables, hot peppers and other spices.

Enslaved Africans likely brought the dish to Philadelphia from the Caribbean in the 18th century, when the two regions were tightly connected through trade.

As a historian of women and labor in the early republic, I have learned how important impoverished and ordinary individuals were to the country’s founding. Cooking and preparing food, spinning and weaving cloth, washing and mending clothes, and caring for the sick were just some of the kinds of labor that supported the fledgling nation. Much of this work was carried out by marginalized women who are often overlooked in national commemorations.

One such woman I’ve researched represents both the possibilities and sharp limitations of freedom in that era. She was a pepper pot seller in Philadelphia known to us only as Dina.

Hiding in plain sight

Pennsylvania, like many northern states, responded to the Declaration of Independence’s rhetorical commitment to liberty by enacting a gradual emancipation law.

On the day the law went into effect in 1780, however, its provisions freed no one.

Children born to enslaved mothers before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for the rest of their lives. Children born after that date remained in bondage until they were 28 years old. So-called “slaves for life,” the status Dina held, would have had no hope of gaining legal freedom.

In the face of this grim reality, some, like Dina, seized freedom for themselves.

She slipped away from her enslaver, Rev. James Anderson, in Middletown, Chester County, sometime in 1785 or 1786 and made her way to nearby Philadelphia.

Almost all of the information we have about Dina comes from a notice Anderson placed in a local newspaper offering a reward for her return. Each detail is stained with his opinions about the woman he held as property. Anderson described Dina as “lusty,” a word that can be interpreted in a number of ways.

White people generally held insidious ideas about Black women’s sexuality in this period. In the 18th century, lusty also meant insolent, which might have conveyed Anderson’s frustrations with Dina’s unwillingness to accept his authority over her. The word also could refer to health and vigor, so it’s possible Anderson was describing Dina’s physique and general affect.

Nonetheless, the advertisement exemplifies the paradox of liberty and enslavement at the nation’s founding.

It is impossible to know how familiar Dina was with Philadelphia, or if she had friends or family there when she arrived. She might have simply decided that her best chance of avoiding recapture was in an urban area where she could blend in with the free Black community that was growing rapidly due to migration from neighboring states and people manumitted by their enslavers. Dina might have imagined she could tuck herself into the hustle and bustle of this incredibly dense city more easily than in a thinly populated rural area.

After Dina got to Philadelphia, she made an interesting decision. Instead of finding more discrete employment, such as working as a domestic, she supported herself by selling pepper pot stew in one of the city’s markets. According to Anderson, she had been seen “numerous times” over the past 18 months.

One of many Black women selling the dish, Dina could essentially hide in plain sight from Anderson and anyone who hoped to collect the US$4 reward he offered.

It is unclear how long she was able to evade Anderson, but the fact that she maintained her freedom for at least a year and a half is remarkable. Philadelphia’s vagrancy docket is full of examples of freedom seekers who were apprehended almost immediately.

Dina’s ultimate fate is unknown. After Anderson’s three newspaper notices, she disappears from the archive. She may have been captured and returned to Anderson. Or it’s possible that working as a pepper pot seller allowed her to gain her freedom permanently.

Opportunity in Philly’s informal economy

Spiraling war debt and inflation during the 1780s fell heavily on the neediest Americans. In Philadelphia, impoverished people often subsisted on bread. Affordable, hearty street food like pepper pot stew would have offered important nutrients and perhaps pleasure from a good meal. By providing cheap, nourishing food for working Philadelphians, pepper pot sellers could be seen as participating in a kind of informal mutual aid.

However, city officials characterized some market activities during this period as “riotous and disorderly” and imposed stricter regulations around when and where pepper pot sellers could operate. Boisterous gatherings of Black and white working-class people might have seemed potentially threatening or disruptive to city leaders.

Dina’s role as an informal trader echoed across the 19th century. Many Black women took up the pepper pot trade, and some earned decent incomes. These women, in turn, contributed to a range of charitable, religious and abolitionist organizations that formed the backbone of a vibrant Black Philadelphia. They also helped support their families, even in an economic order that devalued Black women’s labor.

As the United States celebrates its semiquincentennial this year, many Americans will be reminded of the stories of popular Revolution-era figures such as Paul Revere or George Washington.

But I’ll be thinking of Dina and the countless other Black women who sold pepper pot stew on the streets of Philadelphia, the nation’s first capital. To me, they symbolize the fragile hope, terrible failures and tireless quest for true freedom that defined the founding era.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Carolyn Zola, Lecturer, Department of History, California State University, East Bay

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

Since her official debut in 1959, Supergirl has struggled to emerge from the shadow of her cousin, Superman. So it’s a bold move that the second cinematic release in the newly rebooted DC Universe will be Supergirl.

Milly Alcock first appeared as Supergirl in the epilogue to Superman (2025). Her Supergirl is a brash “party girl” – an immediate contrast to David Corenswet’s squeaky clean rendition of Superman. Based on the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021) by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, she is a traumatised character, dealing with the destruction of her home planet of Krypton. “I have no people,” Supergirl laments in the trailer.

However, Supergirl was not always so introspective. The character and her alter ego, Kara Zor-El, first appeared in 1938, to cash in on the popularity of Superman. She was a preppy teenager who played a supporting helpmate role, allowing Superman to display his paternal side.

Publishers DC Comics also flirted with the concept of Superwoman. A 1943 story had Superman’s girlfriend, reporter Lois Lane, dream that she was Superman’s female counterpart. In her book Supergirl: Contemporary Feminist Reboot of a Hapless DC Comic Helpmate (2022), Batya Weinbaum suggests this moment reflected the “changing position of women in wartime”.

In a 1947 story, Lois Lane, Superwoman! from Superman issue #45, Lane is convinced she has superpowers, only to discover she is the victim of a ruse where Superman is using his influence to simulate the experience. This prompts her frustrated exclamation: “You men who try to keep women weak and defenceless – I hate you!”

Lane may well have been addressing the DC editors who published her adventures. In his cultural history of comic book heroines, comic book historian Mike Madrid outlines an excerpt from 1950s-era DC Comics’ editorial policy which reluctantly accepts stories featuring women, but only if the female characters are “secondary in importance”.

The ever-changing Supergirl

Nevertheless, as Supergirl developed through the 1960s there were signs that she could develop an identity of her own.

Two years after her secret arrival on Earth, in issue #285 of Action Comics, Superman finally reveals Supergirl to the world. She appears in public in an act that cultural historian Gerard Beritela interprets as her “emergence from male domination”. But ultimately Madrid’s take on this era is that “she is a girl, not a woman, and therein lies the secret of her appeal”. Supergirl isn’t a threatening Superwoman who might develop ideas of her own.

This was the model followed in the 1984 attempt to bring Supergirl to cinema screens. In his DVD commentary, director Jeannot Szwarc discusses his intention to convey Supergirl’s grace and intelligence.

Whereas Superman (played by Christopher Reeve) was introduced in 1978 by the same producers with a daring rescue of a plummeting helicopter, Helen Slater’s Supergirl performs an aerial ballet and frolics with woodland creatures. In comics, Supergirl fared even worse. The character was killed off in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, partly because of her threat to Superman’s unique status as “the last son of Krypton”, and partly because of the film’s disappointing box office takings.

Various incarnations of Supergirl have been explored following the obliteration of the original version. This regular rewriting has encouraged creators to experiment.

Danny Fingeroth describes a 1996 example, when fellow comic book writer Peter David developed a version of Supergirl to explore Jewish identity, revising the character as an Earth-bound angel based on the concept of Shekhinah, or the divine feminine. This Supergirl’s stories integrated themes of redemption and spirituality.

In comic books, however, death is never permanent. Kara Zor-El and Supergirl were resurrected in 2004 in The Supergirl from Krypton. There was an attempt to add nuance to the character, with a greater emphasis on the trauma she suffered from witnessing the loss of her home planet. But this was rather undermined by various revealing costumes clearly designed to satisfy the male gaze.

It wasn’t until 2015 and the six season Supergirl television show that creators began to deal head on with the character’s agency. Another updated origin story saw Kara (played by Melissa Benoist) being sent ahead to help her baby cousin acclimatise to life on Earth. But after her spaceship arrives late, she has no clear purpose, finding an already adult and established Superman.

In the pilot episode she finally strikes out on her own with the dramatic rescue of an airliner, assuming the mantle of Supergirl. In a show that employed several female writers and became known for its positive representation of LGBTQ+ issues, problematic topics such as Supergirl’s infantilising name and costume were directly addressed.

Kara refuses to wear revealing versions of the costume from the character’s comic book past. In discussions with her employer, CatCo Worldwide Media CEO Cat Grant, she is told: “I’m a girl. And your boss. And powerful. And rich, and hot, and smart. So, if you perceive Supergirl as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?” Significantly, Grant is portrayed by actor Calista Flockhart, known for the Ally McBeal series – a show that sparked debates about feminism and women in the workplace in the late 1990s.

The 2021 comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow follows the young alien Ruthye Marye Knoll, who recruits Supergirl to seek revenge after her father is murdered. The story is told from Ruthye’s point of view, the fractured narrative lending the story a fatalistic quality. The narration also emphasises the mythic quality of Supergirl, “who lost everything and kept walking”.

It remains to be seen how closely the film will follow the philosophical source material. Meanwhile, in the pages of the latest DC comic book, writer and artist Sophie Campbell has returned to the brighter tone of the 1960s version of the character, merged with the sensibilities of the 2015 television series. The many interpretations of Supergirl continue to reveal the character’s durability and versatility.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

John Caro, Principal Lecturer, Film and Media, University of Portsmouth

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

Chinese food heritage is diverse and vast, and embodies the distinct geographical and historical traces of various cultural identities.

As migrants in Australia, Chinese food features prominently in our everyday lives. Jing grew up eating regional cuisine from northern China; Wilfred grew up eating Cantonese food; Catherine grew up in Singapore enjoying home cooked Chinese food with a Eurasian twist.

The ways in which we understand, approach, enjoy and cook Chinese food are different, and we set out to find the role of food in the lives of other migrants of Chinese ancestry.

Tracing food heritage

We talked to Chinese-Australians between the ages of 18 to 40 to learn about how their food heritages have guided them to navigate and adapt to Australian lives.

They spoke to us about incorporating non-traditional Chinese ingredients, new ways of cooking and sourcing cooking equipment.

In their Australian kitchens, they experimented with the recipes they learnt from their families and those they interpret as “Chinese” cuisine.

They were concerned about authenticity, health and taste to varying degrees in the Chinese dishes they cooked, and spoke about how food heritage helped intergenerational families connect.

Fei* is ethnically Chinese and was born in Indonesia. She has lived in Australia for the past 12 years. She told us:

Whenever I go back to Indonesia, my auntie would cook for us, so I would ask a lot of old recipes […] I love their response because they will always say, when you were a child, you liked to eat this food. They will give you some feedback, but they’ll say, there’s a new way of cooking this.

Fei’s cooking was co-developed with family members, even when they are living in different countries. The art of cooking becomes a way for her family connect, despite distance.

Sally* migrated to Australia about nine years ago from Yunan Province. She shared a poignant story of the health of the older members of her family:

Even my grandmother [who] had Alzheimer’s and she barely remember who am I, but when she had – before I hang up the phone call, she’s like, remember to eat vegetable.

For Sally’s grandmother, even in old age, food was an expression of care.

Food facilitates new understandings of intergenerational family members – even those who have passed away.

Lynn* is an undergraduate student who migrated to Australia as a baby. She describes herself as “ethnically Chinese, but culturally Singaporean”, and told us how she got to know her grandfather through her father’s cooking:

I actually have never tried my grandpa’s chilli crab. I didn’t know that he actually made chilli crab until I think it was like two years [after] he’d passed when my dad made this recipe. […] I’m not sure how similar it was to the original, but it was pretty good.

Lynn’s father’s cooking his father’s chilli crab recipe as a way of honouring him and keeping his memory alive.

New habits

Food heritage is the phrase for the traditional cuisines which define our cultural identities and includes ingredient sourcing, food preparation and food consumption.

Food heritage is not static. It changes as migrants adapt to life in Australia.

Australia’s rich multicultural food cultures create transcultural food experiences for our Chinese-Australians.

Sally spoke to us about her and her mother melding Italian and Chinese ingredients:

If I cook dishes that require Yunnan’s ham, I use Italian prosciutto ham to replace it. It tastes really similar to Yunnan’s ham. My mum does that as well. She likes to get Italian Deli ham, smoked cured bacon, and then she’ll think it tastes like the actual thing from Yunnan.

Rong* came to Australia about 10 years ago from Shandong Province. She told us how she cooks for her daughter who loves noodles:

I need to bring something healthier to her table, and then I was like, okay, I’m not going to use the noodles, the Chinese noodles. I’m going to use pasta noodles, which is low GI, healthier. So, I just tried to figure different kind of ways of the noodles, not only Chinese noodles, but also Italian noodles, Vietnamese noodles, like pho. So all those kinds of things, and she loved them.

Rong also told us that she had to change the way she cooks because her apartment has an induction stove rather than a gas stove.

Although gas and induction stove tops are both common in China, certain dishes such as stir-fry are perceived to taste better in a hot wok on a gas stove.

“Soggy food”, according to many of our participants, is the result of induction stoves and flat pans rather than woks. Rong even told us that now, when she returns to China, she does not know how to cook in a Chinese kitchen with a gas stove.

Adapting to Australia

Food culture, is central to migrant adaptation, acculturation and wellbeing.

By better understanding the evolving nature of food heritage practices in Australia, we can better understand how migrants navigate Australia creatively while these transcultural connections provide an anchor for settlement and belonging.

*Names have been changed.

Catherine Gomes, Professor in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University; Jing Qi, Associate Professor, Social Equity Research Centre, RMIT University, and Wilfred Yang Wang, Senior Lecturer in Media & Communications Studies, The University of Melbourne

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

We see glass objects every day, and often don’t think much about them. Mass-produced glass has become so cheap we barely think about the things it allows us to do.

In fact, glassblowing has a fascinating history dating back to the late first century BCE.

Roman experimentation with recycling glass permanently changed everyday life, facilitating a vast expansion of trade and economic activity.

And the way glassblowing was done during the Roman era is still very similar to the way we do it today.

The old ways

Of course, glass was invented long before glassblowing.

The earliest glass beads were made in Ancient Mesopotamia in the second half of the third millennium BCE (around 4,500–4,000 years ago).

The first closed glass vessels followed about a thousand years later (around 1500–1400 BCE) in Mesopotamia and nearby Ancient Egypt.

These early glass vessels were moulded, and the closed containers were made with a process called core-forming.

This involved sticking a plug made of animal dung, clay, mud and sand onto the end of an iron rod. Molten glass the consistency of treacle (and over 1,000°C), was poured over the plug. After it was worked, decorated, and cooled, the hardened plug had to be scraped out manually.

Later vessels were made with casting techniques (which also involved heating glass and laying it atop a mould). This also required long periods of working, and laborious grinding and polishing. Glass was only for the wealthy as this process took tens of hours to complete.

Invention of a new technology

Glassblowing – invented towards the end of the first century BCE in the coastal Levant (in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan) – cut all this down to mere minutes.

The earliest evidence we have is from modern-day Jerusalem which, in the final quarter of the first century BCE, was ruled by Roman Jewish client kings Herod the Great and Herod Archelaus on behalf of Rome’s Emperor Augustus.

Our earliest glassblowing evidence in Jerusalem suggests furnace workers were experimenting by heating the ends of glass tubes to rework them. Scholars have suggested this was an experiment in glass recycling.

One day, someone blew into that tube and changed the industry – and history – forever. You could now make a glass container quickly and comparatively easily.

Glassworkers spread the technique as they travelled

Ancient glassblowers travelled all over the Mediterranean, and in the first century BCE, the Levant was a hotbed of glass technology and experimentation.

Some of the only named glassworkers we know from that period, such as Ennion, were Greek-speaking Syrians.

Glassworkers and their products soon spread to the rest of the Mediterranean, wherever the Romans were.

Glass vessels were frequently traded or gifted beyond the Roman frontier, with people as widespread as northern Scotland, Scandinavia, the Sahara and even China.

Blown glass vessels became readily available to most of society.

The Greek historian Strabo tells us (not long after the discovery of glassblowing) in Rome, a glass cup could cost as little as one copper coin.

Olive oil and wine were produced in large terracotta amphorae, which were stocked in Roman shops.

Glass containers allowed people to buy smaller quantities at a time, as they could have glass containers filled at shops and taverns.

And because the surface of glass is inert, it does not affect the taste of food or drink – meaning you can store things for longer periods. Most ancient pottery was unglazed (which resulted in seepage), and metals could affect taste.

Roman writers Petronius and Pliny the Elder both share a fanciful story in which the imagined discovery of an unbreakable glass is brought to Rome’s Emperor Tiberius. Tiberius has the man killed, fearing economic collapse as gold and silver would not be as useful or pretty as glass.

Like us, the Romans stored glass jars and bottles on shelves and in cupboards. We can find the vessels where they fell after the eruption of Vesuvius, in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The easiest vessel to make in glass is a small perfume or cosmetic flask. Roman perfumes were oil and fat-based, and having an effective spoil-free container made perfumes and cosmetics more affordable.

Glass changed the way people interacted with food and drink, as well as their personal care and hygiene. It also transformed domestic comfort, as glass windows could provide draught-free light in Roman homes and baths.

Roman art figurines and everyday objects were commonly made into the shape of animals, plants and humans (and sometimes body parts). While simple vessels were most common, Roman glass also got weird and kitschy at times, featuring things such as gladiator fight scenes or a monkey playing the pan-pipes.

Some moulds were made of stone or ceramic and lined with a thin layer of soot (usually from a lamp). This meant the hot glass bubble could be blown inside the mould, and the soot would prevent sticking.

Mythological scenes and themes also featured heavily.

Some vessels featured the equivalent of live, laugh, love in the form of ancient Greek phrases such as katachaire kai euphrainou (rejoice and enjoy yourself!) or euphrainou epi toutoi eph hoi parei (delight in that at which you are present).

Flasks could be shaped like fish or fruit, such as dates and grapes. Presumably, these were the ancient equivalents of the tomato-shaped sauce container at a diner or the plastic soy sauce fish at a sushi chain.

These point to things the Romans found entertaining (and glassworkers thought sellable).

Thomas J. Derrick, Gale Research Fellow in Ancient Glass and Material Culture, Macquarie University

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

The US state of Florida has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging the tech giant and its CEO put profit over public safety with its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) product, ChatGPT.

The lawsuit, filed in Florida state court on Monday local time by Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier, is one of the most significant enforcement actions brought by a state attorney against an AI company to date.

It comes as OpenAI and other big tech companies are embroiled in a growing number of legal cases related to the alleged harm their products have caused.

Six key elements

The complaint opens with a screenshot of OpenAI’s own parental-control page, which states that ChatGPT was “built with safety in mind”. Then, in a standalone paragraph, the State answers with two words: “Not so”.

This signals the central allegation of the case: that OpenAI sold ChatGPT to the public as safe and reliable, while knowing it could cause serious harm

More specifically, there are six key themes to Florida’s case against OpenAI. The first is that the company engaged in deceptive safety marketing, assuring parents the platform is safe for teenage use, while not clearly disclosing that ChatGPT can be wrong.

Second, despite OpenAI’s marketing, ChatGPT is unreliable. A 2025 study, for example, found AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, misrepresent the news roughly 45% of the time. Similarly, despite marketing suggesting ChatGPT can handle financial affairs, ChatGPT has failed in meeting basic accounting standards and provided incorrect tax advice to users.

The third element of the case is the public safety threat. The danger to young people in particular is illustrated by the tragic story of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who died by suicide in April 2025 after engaging in long conversations with ChatGPT. When Adam expressed suicidal thoughts, ChatGPT responded that it “won’t try to talk you out of your feelings”. It helped Adam plan a “beautiful suicide” and even offered to write his suicide note for him.

Why would a product behave this way? Because, Uthmeier argues, it was built to.

OpenAI designed ChatGPT to be highly agreeable, to say “yes” roughly ten times as often as “no”, according to a Washington Post review of 47,000 conversations. This forms the fourth element of the case – commercial exploitation through sycophancy. In other words, ChatGPT optimistically parrots back users’ responses in order to to manipulate them into deeper conversations, regardless of truth or safety.

But according to the lawsuit, even ordinary use carries a cost: it weakens people’s brain activity and critical thinking skills (also known as cognitive atrophy). This is the fifth element of the case.

The sixth and final element is knowledge – specifically, the knowledge of Samuel Altman. According to Uthmeier, since at least 2023, OpenAI’s own documents warned that the model could coach people on committing crimes, but Altman overruled the safety staff.

These six elements paint a picture of a product marketed as safe, engineered to be addictive, and known by its own makers to be dangerous – yet sold to us, anyway.

Altman is at the centre of that picture. The complaint reconstructs his career and reaches for an April 2026 New Yorker investigation and testimony from the recent legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI to depict a man, who in Uthmeier’s telling, repeatedly chose speed over safety.

That is why Uthmeier is asking the court to hold Altman personally liable for “his utter disregard for the risk to human life”.

Pay for past harms

Uthmeier is asking the court to declare that OpenAI broke the law, then to order the company to stop – permanently – its unlawful practices.

He wants the company barred from collecting children’s data without parental consent and the safeguards that should come with it, and barred from misrepresenting or staying silent about ChatGPT’s risks.

On top of the injunctions, the state is seeking civil penalties of up to US$10,000 per violation for OpenAI’s alleged wilful violation of the the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. Uthmeier said penalties could total billions of dollars.

In other words: pay for the past harms and change the product going forward.

In a statement to The Conversation, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed to the company’s “industry leading protections and policies” regarding user safety.

In particular we built safety for minors directly into our products, including a more protective experience specifically for minors, an age prediction tool, defaulting users whose age we are not confident into our more protective experience, and giving parents tools to monitor their kids use of AI.

Adding to a growing pile

This lawsuit is a significant development, but it has not arrived in a vacuum.

Across the US, the courts are filling with cases accusing tech companies of harming young people. In April, for example, Uthmeier launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI over the chatbot’s alleged role in a shooting at Florida State University.

Some juries have started to side with the plaintiffs.

In March 2026, for example, a New Mexico jury hit Meta with a US$375 million penalty in a child safety case. Days later, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google liable in a landmark trial over social media addiction.

This case rides the same current. But it broadens the scope by alleging Altman himself should be personally responsible.

Uthmeier is demanding a trial by jury.

Alexandra Andhov, Chair in Law and Technology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

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

Tax time is coming – and with it, the unfortunate reality of needing to do something to get ready.

Don’t put your head in the sand and ignore it. That’s how you can end up missing the October 31 deadline and potentially end up with fines and penalties.

And don’t risk taking tax advice from unofficial sources.

This year, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has warned against relying on online tips or “tax hacks” from “finfluencers”: financial influencers on social media. It’s also warned artificial intelligence platforms can draw from outdated, inaccurate or foreign sources – so using them for your tax can be risky.

If you’re seeking advice, always ensure you are dealing with a registered tax agent.

Luckily, the ATO has been improving its online tax tools, so lodging your tax yourself is not as daunting as it once was.

A growing trend to DIY taxes

More than 6.1 million Australians (around 43%) did their own tax online with MyTax in 2025.

More than 8.1 million (around 57%) still choose to use a tax agent.

But doing your own tax has been a steadily growing trend for more than a decade, as more people realise the ease of using MyTax.

The tax office knows a lot

As a taxpayer, you have the obligation to tell the ATO what you have earned – even if you think you don’t have to pay any tax.

While the ATO know a lot more about you than you might realise, they are not mind readers.

The tax office collects more than 600 million transactions annually from various third parties. Sometimes they share the information with you – such as when they pre-fill sections of your MyTax form – but sometimes they don’t.

While articles like this about tax time often focus on claiming deductions, being transparent about your income is non-negotiable.

Whatever you claim on your tax return, the onus is on you to get it right.

If you have deposits in your bank account, can you explain where those came from? If not, the ATO may deem that those deposits were income. Then it is up to you as the taxpayer to prove otherwise.

Claiming work deductions

When you get to your deductions, there are three “golden rules” to remember:

• you have to have spent the money and not been reimbursed (such as if your employer paid for your phone or petrol expenses)
• your spending must be directly related to earning your income
• you must have proof (usually a receipt).

If you are claiming working from home, there are two options to reduce your tax bill: the fixed rate or actual cost approaches.

The $0.70 per hour fixed-rate method is much simpler. For most people doing their own tax, it’s the one you’re more likely to use.

But watch out for traps. To claim this deduction, you need to keep records the entire year.

And the fixed-rate method includes common expenses such as phones and stationery, so don’t double dip by claiming those separately.

You cannot claim rent or interest for working from home, unless your home is an actual place of business, such as a doctor’s surgery or hair salon.

Similarly, you cannot claim everyday clothing. To claim a deduction on clothing, it needs to be occupation specific, protective (such as steel-capped boots), a compulsory uniform (likely to be written into your employment contract) or a registered non-compulsory work uniform.

You cannot claim private travel. This includes driving to and from work, or commuting on public transport. There are very limited exceptions.

Don’t just rollover your claims from last year, either. What have you actually spent this year – and have you got the receipts to back it up?

Why you can’t claim a $1,000 ‘instant’ deduction just yet

There’s been a lot of coverage about the $1,000 “instant” tax deduction and the “working Australians tax offset” of $250, announced in last month’s federal budget.

These are not relevant for this tax season. Those are due to start from next financial year and beyond, assuming they’re passed by parliament.

When it’s better to lodge early or later

Taxpayers should lodge when required. Think Goldilocks here: not too soon – and not too late.

If you try to do it too early, ATO data matching may not be complete. Generally that’s done by around end of July.

You’re better off waiting until all the information is there, otherwise the ATO is likely to amend your return. You can either lodge yourself or use a registered tax agent.

Expecting a tax refund? You’re better off lodging earlier, from late July on. For simple, self-lodged tax returns, you can generally expect to get a refund within about two weeks. So that means you’ll have more money in your bank account sooner.

Expecting a tax bill? That’s when you’re better off lodging just in time: by October 31 if you’re submitting yourself, or making sure you have a tax agent locked in by then.

Where to get help

The ATO provides a variety of guidance and advice to support taxpayers, while tax agents can help you to pay the right amount of tax.

Be careful of unregistered tax agents, particularly those tax “influencers” offering huge refunds. If you’re unsure, check this official register.