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In February, Leicester Cathedral hosted a British Sign Language (BSL) service celebrating a deaf marriage that took place in the church 450 years ago, in 1576.

The groom was a deaf blacksmith from Leicester named Thomas Tilsey, who made his wedding vows in sign. It was so unusual that the clerk who witnessed the marriage recorded it in full in the parish records. Although the BBC reported that this marriage was “one of the earliest recorded examples of inclusive worship”, by 1576 deaf people had been marrying using sign language for almost 400 years.

These signs were probably not the complex languages we know today as BSL or ASL, but rather what linguists describe as “homesign”: a semi-structured form of signing that develops in small groups of deaf people. However, it was still complicated enough for deaf men and women to rely on friends and family to act as interpreters and structured enough that the 17th century mathematician John Wallis described learning the “language” of deaf signers.

The medieval church’s acknowledgement that signs were equivalent to a spoken language was transformative for deaf people. Sign language recognition unlocked the world, letting deaf people inherit property, go to court and even challenge their hearing friends and family. It is not a straightforward story of inclusion, however, and it is a struggle for equality that continues today, with the British Deaf Association continuing to campaign for the equal access to BSL.

Sign and the law

In 1198, Pope Innocent III issued a decree that deaf people should be able to get married by making their vows in sign language. Since marriage has wide-reaching legal implications, this was a powerful recognition that deaf signers were as capable of consent as anyone else.

These decrees became part of the church law that stretched across Europe, and gradually the principle was applied in other areas too. After the papal ruling, deaf people used sign language to go to court. In England, a court case involving a deaf signer was recorded in 1344, and by the start of Henry VII’s reign it was being routinely taught to legal students that signs could replace vocal speech in property law.

In churches across Europe, including England, deaf people could attend Mass or make their confession using signs. These practices were carried into the new Protestant Church of England.

The significance of recognising sign languages as equivalent to a spoken language can not be overstated. It challenged a long legal tradition, first seen in ancient Rome, that decreed people who were deaf and did not speak were cognitively impaired and should be treated like infants in legal situations.

Since deaf people could neither hear to understand, nor express their consent, lawyers across Europe argued well into the early modern period that they could not make contracts or even be held responsible for crimes.

As late as the 17th century, the barrister Michael Dalton claimed in a legal handbook that “if a man born deaf and dumb killeth another that is no felony, for he cannot know whether he did evil or no”. This reflected a long tradition, often attributed to Aristotle, that speech was necessary for intelligent thought, and was evidence that humans were superior to animals.

Perhaps the greatest test of how far sign language was recognised came when deaf people challenged their hearing family. Another deaf marriage, this time in Jacobean Essex in 1618, involved just that. The groom was a young deaf man called Thomas Speller, who had moved to a nearby village to train as an apprentice, fallen in love with his master’s daughter – Sarah Earle – and wanted to marry her.

Thomas’ mother, Winifred, objected – perhaps because the marriage would mean an end to a significant annuity. She did everything she could to stop the marriage. She complained that Sarah was a fortune hunter, that Thomas was being forced into the marriage against his will and that he was not capable of making informed consent.

The local bishop launched an investigation, but it was only when Thomas and Sarah travelled to London to see a representative of the bishop that the case was concluded. A secretary recorded that Thomas told the bishop’s lawyer that he wanted to marry Sarah, and he did so in sign language. His mother’s concerns were put aside, and a marriage license was issued for the pair to get married. They did so a few weeks later in London, with Thomas using signs to marry Sarah. And while it was unusual – the parish clerk noted “we had never seen the like before” – without Thomas’ mother in the picture, it went off without a hitch.

A couple of decades later, in Bedfordshire, another deaf man – George Blount – married against his parents’ will. This time the problem seems to have been that he married a former family servant, someone they held in low esteem, describing her as “one of our menial servants of unclear parentage”. When George’s father, Giles, believed that he would have to support any children from the marriage he wrote to his local magistrate, claiming that the marriage was invalid since George was not capable of consenting.

Again, there was an investigation, and the witnesses from the wedding and the vicar were interviewed: they all reported that though George couldn’t say the words of the wedding ceremony, he showed his “willingness” to marry and was declared “full of understanding”. The case was rejected, and George and his wife moved away from his parents, going on to have a long and apparently happy marriage.

Despite these success stories, prejudices about deafness and intellectual ability continued even as sign language allowed some men and women to assert themselves. Returning to the marriage of 1576 celebrated in Leicester Cathedral, we can see something of that. Before Thomas Tilsey was allowed to marry, he had to prove to the Mayor of Leicester, to the town council and to the bishop that he was intellectually capable of understanding what marriage was.

In addition, Tilsey’s friends and family had to vouch for him. When it came to the wedding ceremony itself, he had to use pre-approved signs which closely mimicked the service in the prayer book and could be understood by anyone. This was much closer to miming than the signs used by most deaf people.

Rosamund Oates, Professor in History, Manchester Metropolitan University

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

Whether it’s enjoying a podcast, listening to music or chatting on the phone, many of us spend hours a day using our headphones. One 2017 study of 4,185 Australians showed they used headphones on average 47–88 hours a month.

Health advice about headphones tends to focus on how loud sounds might affect our hearing. For example, to avoid hearing loss, the World Health Organization advises people to keep the volume at below 60% their device’s maximum and to use devices that monitor sound exposure and limit volume.

But apart from sound, what else is going in our ears? Using headphones – particularly in-ear versions such as earbuds – blocks the ear canal and puts the skin in contact with any dirt or bacteria they may be carrying.

Here’s what you need to know about keeping your ears clean and safe.

First, let’s take a look at your ear

Over-ear headphones cover the entire external ear – the elastic cartilage covered by skin that’s shaped to trap soundwaves. In-ear headphones (as well as hearing aids) are shaped to fit and cover the entrance to the external ear canal, which is called the concha.

Sound vibrations travel through the ear canal – which is S-shaped and a few centimetres long – to reach your ear drum.

Deeper parts of the ear canal produce earwax and oils. These help keep your skin healthy, hydrated and less vulnerable to infection.

Tiny hairs in the ear canal also help regulate temperature and keep foreign debris out. These hairs and earwax help trap and move small particles, shed skin and bacteria out of the ear canal.

Earwax is the ear’s self-cleaning method and we only tend to notice it when there’s too much.

Excessive buildup can block your hearing or even clog the mesh of your earpods. But don’t try to dig earwax out of your ears yourself. If you’re concerned, speak to a pharmacist or GP for advice.

How headphones can affect the ear’s bacteria

Healthy ear canals host a range of non-harmful microbes – mainly bacteria, but fungi and viruses too. They compete for space and nutrients, and this diversity makes it trickier for any potential pathogens (disease-causing microorganisms) to take hold.

But wearing headphones (and other in-ear devices such as hearing aids or ear plugs) may upset the balance between “good” and “bad” bacteria.

One 2024 study compared bacteria in the external ear canals of 50 people who used hearing aids and 80 who didn’t. The researchers found hearing-aid users – whose external ear canals are blocked for extended periods – had fewer types of bacteria than those who didn’t.

Another 2025 study looked at how using headphones (including over-ear, in-ear and on-ear) affected fungi and bacteria in the ear canal. It found using headphones was linked to a greater risk of ear infections, especially if people shared them.

This may because wearing headphones – especially in-ear devices – makes the external ear canal hotter and more humid. Trapped moisture is especially likely if you exercise and sweat while wearing headphones.

Higher humidity increases your risk of ear infection and discharge, including pus.

Wearing in-ear devices such as hearing aids or headphones for extended periods can also interfere with the ear’s natural “self-cleaning” function, aided by earwax.

So, what should I do?

Most of us need – or like – to wear headphones in our day-to-day routines. But for good ear health, it’s important to give your ears a break.

Allow your ear canals to “breathe” at different points throughout the day so they’re not constantly blocked and growing humid and hot.

You could also try bone conduction headphones. These don’t block the ear canal, because they transmit sound through your skull directly into the inner ear, without needing to block the ear canal. These can be expensive though. And while they allow our ears to breathe, high-intensity vibrations (high volume) can still damage hearing, so as with all headphones caution is required.

Other tips

Clean your devices regularly

Recommendations range from once a week to daily to after a physical workout.

For example, you can wipe them with a cloth or use a soft-bristled children’s toothbrush dampened with mildly soapy water. Blot dry with a paper towel and allow a few hours of drying before recharging or reuse.

But it’s best to follow your manufacturer’s guidelines. And don’t forget to clean the case and the body of your earbuds too.

Don’t use headphones when sick

If you have an ear infection, avoid using earphones as they may increase the temperature and humidity in your ear and slow recovery.

Watch for symptoms

If your ears become itchy, red or have discharge, stop using in-ear devices and seek medical advice.

Rina Wong (Fu), Research Fellow, Health Sciences, Curtin University

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

Irish politician Thomas Gould has become a bit of star in the Caribbean after a video of him speaking in the Irish parliament drew comments for the surprising similarity of his Cork accent to the Jamaican one.

His viral speech is a powerful reminder of the shared histories of Ireland and Jamaica, which date back to the mid-17th century and lasted for the next 200 years. During this period Jamaica became an important destination for Irish people.

In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, was on a mission to expand the British empire. Having completed the conquest of Ireland in 1653, he captured Jamaica from Spain in 1655.

During the later 1650s, the Cromwellians transplanted hundreds of Irish Catholics to Jamaica where they worked as indentured servants. This form of labour involved an investor who covered the cost of the indentured servant’s passage, food, clothing and shelter on the plantations in return for up to seven years of contracted labour (ten years in the case of convicts).

On termination of the indenture, masters were legally bound to offer “freedom dues”, roughly £10 to £12, in the form of a small parcel of land and a sum of money or its commodity equivalent. Unlike enslaved people, indentured servants had some legal rights, even if it proved difficult to exercise them. However, during the period of indenture the person was, like an enslaved person, at the mercy of their master.

During the 1660s, Irish men and women relocated from elsewhere in the Caribbean to Jamaica on the promise of up to 20 acres of land on the condition that they re-indentured themselves for two or three years.

The Irish poet, Seán Ó Conaill, memorialised these transplantees in The Dirge of Ireland when he wrote in a poem “Transport, Transplant go to Jamaica”.

Relegated to marginal areas in the interior of the island, these poor Irish were vilified and perceived to be unruly, rebellious and loyal to the French because of their Catholicism. They worked as domestic servants or as labourers cultivating sugar, indigo, cotton, cocoa and other commodities. Living in a tropical climate, where hurricanes and other natural disasters occurred regularly, and where deadly diseases were rife shortened life expectancies. Only one in three children reached the age of five.

By 1690 Irish men and women, Catholic and Protestant alike, formed a significant part of the white population, which numbered between 10,000 and 12,000 with around 40,000 enslaved people. While Catholic indentured servants laboured, Protestants from Ireland owned plantations and governed.

When Governor William O’Brien, second earl of Inchiquin, died of “the flux” (dysentery) in 1692, Coleraine-born John Bourden, who owned a plantation in the parish of St. Catherine, filled his shoes. Others included Sir George Nugent (1801 to 1804), Eyre Coote (1806 to 1808); and the earl of Belmore (1828 to 1832).

Migration from Ireland to Jamaica continued well into the 18th century. In 1731, the governor of the island complained that “native Irish papists … [were] pouring in upon us in such sholes [shoals]”. Some Irish remained on the margins, but others prospered as modest planters or as artisans, coopers, carpenters and merchants in Port Royal, Jago de la Vega (Spanish town), Irish town and Kingston.

Jane Fitzgerald, a garment trader, was listed in an inventory, as were Irish men like Michael Farrell, a millwright, John Casey, a tavern keeper, Michael Hanigan, a tailor, and Conn Connelly, a bricklayer and builder. The survival of a census dating from 1679 for St. John’s parish, Jamaica, shows that men with Irish names headed three (of 49) households: “Teag Macmarrow” with two white servants and eight enslaved Africans (including three children); Thomas Kelly with two enslaved Africans; and Gilbert Kennedy with a wife and two children, four white servants, and ten slaves (including four children).

Some left wills when they died. These paint pictures of close-knit Irish communities comprised of extended family members and reinforced by intermarriage. Many were upwardly mobile and well connected.

One of the best examples of an Irish family succeeding in Jamaica is the Kelly family, whose grand estates and sugar mills were painted by Isaac Mendes Belisario in 1740. Edmund Kelly became attorney general of Jamaica in 1714. Elizabeth Kelly, his granddaughter and heir, owned plantations of 20,000 acres and 360 enslaved Africans when in 1752 she married Peter Browne of Westport.

The Brownes became Ireland’s premier absentee (run from abroad) plantation owners in the Caribbean. When slavery was finally abolished in 1830s, around 400 people from Jamaica had Irish connections, including many who owned enslaved Africans.

Today Irish surnames – Kelly, Lynch, Murphy, McCarthy, O’Brien, O’Connor, O’Reilly, and O’Hara – are common on the island. Placenames also testify to the presence of early Irish settlers: Irish town, Irish Pen, Irish Road, Sligoville, Bangor Ridge Square, Leinster Road, Leitrim Avenue, Antrim Crescent, Longford Road, Kinsale Avenue, Waterford, and Portmore. Shared speech patterns, especially accents from Munster, are also common.

So with Jamaicans being surprised to hear aspects of their own accents in Thomas Gould’s it’s an opportunity to think about the culture’s complicated shared history and the lasting legacy of the Irish in Jamaica,

Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin

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

The complex relationship between mother and child is no easy thing to capture on canvas. For Mother’s Day, we asked five experts to share their favourite painting of a mother or maternal figure.

1. Hunting for Lice by Gerard ter Borch (1652)

This small painting, displayed in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, is of a scene that might be familiar to any carer for nursery- or school-aged children today. Gerard ter Borch captures the look of concentrated maternal resolve and patient resignation by the child, who is probably a boy, judging by his smock and the ball in his hand.

He has paused his play and leans into the stout frame of his seated and respectably dressed mother. Typical of Dutch genre painting, it carries a moral message and finds spirituality in the humblest acts. The fine-toothed comb was an artistic and poetic symbol for purging the soul as well as the body, so this mother is not only caring for the physical health of her son but also looking to his eventual salvation. But we can also just enjoy her slight smile of pleasure and gratification in this moment of purposeful closeness with her dear child.

Marius Kwint is a reader in visual culture

2. Madonna of the Pilgrims by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1603-5)

Caravaggio’s altarpiece, the Madonna of the Pilgrims, offers a beguiling mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary. The setting is minimal, plain and achingly mundane: a doorframe with chipped masonry; some exposed bricks; a stone doorstep. A young mother – beautiful, but a little down-at-heel – supports a weighty infant on her hip.

The bond between mother and child is tangible, believable and thoroughly human. Their faint halos, though, confirm that these figures are far from ordinary. The gloomy doorway where they stand is, apparently, the entrance to the shrine of the Holy House of Loreto, the Virgin Mary’s home.

The humble, kneeling pilgrims at the Virgin’s door are not only shabbily dressed but actually grubby – the dirty feet of one made this painting notorious. Yet their piety is rewarded as the holy figures gaze on them sympathetically and Christ seems to extend his small hand in a gesture of blessing.

Alice E. Sanger is an honorary associate and associate lecturer in art history

3. Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist by Édouard Vuillard (1893)

Most western painting romanticises mothers, highlighting blissful, tender intimacy. In these paintings, mothers are usually young, with babies or small children. But where are the complex realities of mother-child difficulty, separation and resentment – and of motherhood as tribulation and endurance (think adolescent and boomerang kids)?

Édouard Vuillard’s Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) portrays a psychologically intense mother-daughter adult relationship. Vuillard painted his mother more than 500 times and lived with her till she died (when he was 60). He said: “Ma maman, c’est ma muse” – my mother is my muse.

In the crowded space of Interior, a mature Madame Vuillard dominates: legs akimbo, elbows jutting like a seated boxer’s, her solid black body a vortex pulling in the room, its furniture and her daughter. The daughter is consumed by the oppressive domesticity (as shown by the wallpaper) and simultaneously repelled by and drawn – bowing – towards her mother. The power is starkly asymmetrical, and intimacy disturbing. Mother-child relations are sometimes unsavoury. In Interior, Vuillard boldly acknowledges this truth.

Jen Harvie is a professor of contemporary theatre and performance

4. The Mothers by Käthe Kollwitz (1921-1922)

Mothers huddled together in unimaginable pain and grief. I just can’t get past this image right now. This woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz is the second last of her war portfolio. Her personal experience informed the print. Her son, Peter, was killed on the front in 1914.

The mothers in Kollwitz’s image form almost a sculptural mass, a community bound together by throbbing heartache. This highly emotive image shows the irretrievable consequences of war, the children that these mothers have lost, and are afraid of losing.

Wars might be won and lost in the air, or on the front, or in a control room somewhere far away, but I believe it is the women and children on the ground who suffer the most. And it is the mothers who have to carry the weight of the loss of a generation.

Pragya Agarwal is a visiting professor of social inequities and injustice

5. Mother and Child by William Rothenstein (1903)

In the 1900s William Rothenstein completed a series of paintings depicting his wife – the actor Alice Knewstub – posed in various interiors. The paintings chart the early years of their marriage and the growth of their family. Mother and Child, which falls somewhere in the middle of this series, represents Alice holding their oldest child John (who would go on to become director of the Tate).

Rothenstein’s representations of the mother and child relationship differ across the paintings. What I think he captures especially well in this one is the way in which parents support their children to stand up, knowing that one day those legs may take them far away. Alice’s attention is on John, but John’s attention is on whatever is going on outside the window. The positioning of the model ship just above his head extends the theme of wanting to hold onto something that cannot be held forever.

I’ve always wondered whether this painting was well known to one of Rothenstein’s later students, a young sculptor called Henry Moore, who was similarly (and more famously) drawn to the subject of the mother holding a child. It seems very likely.

Samuel Shaw is a senior lecturer in art history

What is your favourite painting of a mother or maternal figure? Let us know in the comments below.

Our senior arts and culture editor Anna Walker’s favourite is Breakfast in Bed by Mary Cassatt (1897). So much can be read in the mother’s face – exhaustion, love, fear, protectiveness. Through her painting, Cassatt immortalises an intimate moment from the fleeting period of a child’s infancy.

Marius Kwint, Reader in Visual Culture, University of Portsmouth; Alice Sanger, Honorary Associate and Associate Lecturer, The Open University; Jen Harvie, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Queen Mary University of London; Pragya Agarwal, Visiting Professor of Social Inequities and Injustice, Loughborough University, and Samuel Shaw, Lecturer in History of Art, The Open University

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

Once, the only nut butter on the supermarket shelf was peanut butter. Now you can also buy almond, cashew, hazelnut and macadamia nut butters, or blends.

So which is the healthiest nut butter to spread on your toast?

As we’ll see, the healthiest is not just about the actual nut. It’s also about what else goes in the jar.

What do they all have in common?

All nut butters are made from ground nuts that provide healthy monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, plant-based protein, fibre. They also provide essential minerals, such as magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron.

Across decades of research, regularly eating nuts is associated with a lower risk of heart disease and premature death. That benefit appears whether the nut is peanut, almond or cashew or any other type of nut.

But many commercial products contain vegetable oils, palm oil, salt, sugar, or stabilisers to improve texture and shelf life. These added ingredients dilute the nutritional quality and increase salt or kilojoules without providing any health benefits.

Choosing a nut butter made only from nuts (or nuts with minimal salt) means you get the full nutritional value.

How do I choose a nut butter?

Check the ingredients list. The healthiest options contain just one ingredient – nuts. Some added salt is fine, if minimal. But avoid products with seed oils (such as canola oil), palm oil, fillers or added sugars.

Looking at the nutrients in each nut butter per serve (a tablespoon, about 16 grams) can highlight how they differ. The numbers vary slightly by brand. But when the product contains 100% nuts, the numbers don’t generally change dramatically between nuts.

To keep things simple, we’ve focused on peanut, almond and cashew butters:

• protein: peanut butter wins slightly for protein content, at 3.84g per tablespoon, making it a solid choice for post-workout snacks or adding extra protein to your day. However, almond (3.36g) and cashew butters (2.82g) aren’t far behind. So they still contribute meaningful protein to your diet

• fat: almond butter takes the top spot for healthy fats (8.88g per tablespoon), followed closely by peanut (7.98g) and cashew butter (7.9g). The fats in nuts are mainly heart-healthy monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which have been associated with improved cholesterol levels and reduced inflammation

• carbohydrates: cashew butter contains the most carbohydrates (4.42g per tablespoon), which might be important if you’re looking for quick energy before a workout or if you have type 1 diabetes and are adjusting your medication based on your carbohydrate intake. Then comes peanut butter (3.49g), followed by almond butter (3.01g)

• fibre: almond butter takes the lead for fibre (1.65g per tablespoon) followed by peanut butter (1.06g). Cashew butter lags significantly behind (0.32g), about one-fifth of the almond butter’s content. This makes cashew butter the weakest option if you’re relying on nut butter to contribute to your daily fibre intake

• calcium: almond butter dramatically outperforms the others for calcium, with 55.5 milligrams per tablespoon. This offers about eight times more than peanut butter (6.56mg) and cashew butter (6.88mg). This makes almond butter an excellent choice for bone health, especially if you avoid dairy

• potassium: both peanut and almond butter tie for potassium content (120mg per tablespoon). This makes them useful for supporting healthy blood pressure and muscle function. Cashew butter contains 87.4mg

• iron: cashew butter leads the pack for iron (0.805mg for tablespoon), followed by almond butter (0.558mg) and peanut butter (0.304mg). This is particularly relevant for people with higher iron needs, such as those menstruating, pregnant or breastfeeding, or people following plant-based diets. But overall, nut butters are not a meaningful source of iron

• zinc: cashew butter (0.826mg per tablespoon) offers nearly twice the zinc of peanut butter (0.445mg). Almond butter’s zinc content is in the middle (0.526mg). This makes cashew butter valuable for immune function and wound healing

• selenium: cashew butter provides the most selenium (1.84 micrograms per tablespoon), an important antioxidant mineral that supports thyroid function. Peanut butter comes in second (1.2µg), while almond butter contains notably less (0.384µg)

• magnesium: almond butter leads for magnesium (44.6mg per tablespoon). Close behind is cashew butter (41.3mg), then peanut butter (25.4mg). This mineral is crucial for muscle relaxation, sleep quality and energy production.

In a nutshell

Each nut butter has distinct nutritional advantages:

• peanut butter leads in protein and ties with almond butter for potassium, making it ideal for muscle support and feeling full

• almond butter is the standout for calcium, and is also higher in fibre, magnesium and heart-healthy fats. This makes it an excellent choice for bone health, digestion and cardiovascular support

• cashew butter is naturally sweet and is the strongest source of minerals such as iron, zinc and selenium. These are essential for immune function, energy production and thyroid health. However, it is the lowest in both protein and fibre. So while it contributes valuable micronutrients, it’s better suited as an occasional option rather than a primary protein source.

Any concerns?

Often, almond and cashew butters are processed on equipment that’s been used to process peanuts or other nuts. So traces of one nut may appear in another nut butter, which is stated on the label. So if you have a specific nut allergy, check labels carefully.

The cost also varies. Almond and cashew butters are usually slightly more expensive (at around A$2.40 per 100g) compared with about $1.82 per 100g for peanut butter.

What now?

No single nut butter reigns supreme as each brings different nutritional strengths.

The smartest approach would be to keep more than one on hand, choose versions made from 100% nuts, and let your taste preferences and nutritional goals guide you.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University

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

The long arm of the library has made a writer of me. This long arm, a composite of many libraries, created the conditions through which a shy reader could continue to live in her head.

I was born and raised in India. It is a country of daily wage earners in makeshift dwellings trying to survive alongside the world’s richest individuals ensconced in immovable towers. It is also a country where the practice of circulating knowledge through libraries has a long history.

It ranges from the library at Nalanda University founded in 427CE, over a thousand years before the Bodleian at Oxford, to Radhamani, the “walking library”, who takes books to villagers in rural Kerala. And from nine-year-old Muskan, who started her own library for kids in the slums of Bhopal, to Kavita Saini from Rajasthan, who opened a library for girls not allowed to leave their village.

This tradition of sharing knowledge held in written texts is bound up with aspiration, pleasure and survival.

Borrowed words as toys

For many years, my mother worked at Glaxo Laboratories in Mumbai. Along with tins of the nutrition drink Complan, she also brought home a variety of borrowed books and magazines from what we think was called the “Glaxo Workers Sports Library”.

The privilege of access to such a workplace lending library ensured that, in the safety and comfort of my home, I could read with great pleasure: Enid Blyton, The Adventures of Tintin, Woman’s Era and Savvy magazines, The Illustrated Weekly of India.

Along with mum’s “office” books with their flap on the first page marking the names of borrowers and the dates of their borrowing, we had access to books from Kitab Khana, a circulating library in the tallest apartment complex in our area. It was a storehouse of Archie comics and the Amar Chitra Katha series, Indian mythology told through comics.

Our apartment block had its own circulating library, where I sometimes volunteered so that I could read Inside Outside magazine, a luscious interior design publication edited by Naomi Menezes and Mallika Sarabhai, two women ahead of their time.

The words in these books and magazines turned into imaginative wanderings on the page in my school assignments, where I played with these words as if with new toys: amateur, legionnaire, blistering barnacles.

Later, as an undergraduate at St Xavier’s, Mumbai, among the rows of books and journals stacked on metal racks and wooden shelves in the Lending Library, a space anchored by Dewey Decimals, soaring with Shakespeare, Austen, Tagore and Rushdie, I began my internship, although I didn’t know it then.

Up a few flights of wood and stone steps, in the Reference Library, amid card catalogues in ornate wooden cabinets, I read, I reflected, I wrote notes on lined paper, surrounded by the stability of oak, the hardiness of teak, and the words of the outside world waiting to be incorporated.

From the British Council Library and the US Information Services Library, there were books borrowed and carted home on crowded Mumbai trains, some read, some unread, most returned on time: Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, Langston Hughes.

The work of writing begins with attention to acts of generosity and care: the writer gifting their imaginative labour to the writer-in-waiting, who is always a reader, often with the library enabling this exchange. It continues as one is startled by another writer’s fresh use of language, as one yields to the surprise of fictive worlds. Amid this slow but sure transmission of knowledge, through the pleasure of reading, a writer is undone and made anew.

In Sydney, burdened with an empty wallet, surrounded by plane trees and citizenship ceremonies, I settled into the arms of the free council-run libraries, in Chatswood, Ashfield, Campsie, Earlwood and Marrickville, then in Springwood and Katoomba, and the library at the University of New South Wales, my natural homes.

In these places I encountered clarity and conviction in the words of others, clichés stopped in their tracks, expectations subverted and made beautiful on the page: Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Gwen Harwood, Michelle de Kretser, Robin Walsh, Marjorie Barnard, Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Reynolds and Hannah Arendt.

Reading rare materials ‘because I asked’

Eventually I came to the Mitchell Library Reading Room at the State Library of NSW, where I could knock, seek, ask for Alexander Lesueur’s 1802 map of Sydney or a 1792 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman or the journals of Governor Lachlan Macquarie and they would be given unto me.

In Edinburgh, in the Special Collections Reading Room of the National Library of Scotland, overlooking a city of stone and sagacious light, I asked for and received a 200-year-old diary, its paper like linen, the handwriting within it like trees of rowan and beech bending to the wind.

This and other rare materials were lent to me, a woman from the other side of the world, simply because I asked. Weights of different shapes and sizes were provided to protect the material, guidance offered, all my questions answered. Yet again, I was a beneficiary of the long arm of the library reaching out with a commitment to the sharing of knowledge through responsible custodianship.

In March 2024, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, approximately 427 kilometres from Nalanda University, a viral video showed an eight-year-old girl running away as a politician’s bulldozers were demolishing her makeshift dwelling. Unlike me, she was growing up without a safe and comfortable home.

As she ran for her life, she carried in her arms only the essentials for survival: not money nor food nor clothing but the things that mattered most, her books, her own little library – its long arms protecting her and being protected by her; hopefully, inevitably making her anew.

This is an extract from The Library That Made Me, edited by Richard Neville and Phillipa McGuinness, published by NewSouth Publishing in partnership with the State Library of NSW.

Roanna Gonsalves, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, UNSW Sydney

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

When English author J.R.R. Tolkien crafted his fantasy world Middle-earth, he argued storytellers are essentially “sub-creators” – they build fictional realms with internally consistent laws.

For a world to be truly immersive and believable, readers apply what is known as the “principle of minimal departure”. This assumes anything not explicitly magical, such as a planet’s weather or gravity, must adhere to the laws of the real world.

In this spirit of rigorous worldbuilding, we just published a new study where we merged the disparate disciplines of literary worldbuilding and climate modelling.

We used complex computer programs – the same ones used to forecast Earth’s future warming scenarios – to simulate the climates of famous fantasy settings such as Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the continents of Westeros in the Game of Thrones, and the far-future Earth in The Wheel of Time series. We also built a model for a fictional world developed by one of us.

It’s a seemingly whimsical exercise, but it serves serious purposes.

For starters, it provides new details on fictional worlds beyond what the author shared, “filling the gaps” with science.

More importantly, it offers a new way for us to communicate the fundamental physics of climate science to a broad, general audience. And exploring climate model behaviour under fantastical settings helps our understanding of model physics.

Why the Misty Mountains are so misty

Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, was known for his extraordinary attention to detail. He meticulously calculated distances, times, and even phenomena such as the direction of the wind at every step along the characters’ journey.

Working from Tolkien’s own detailed maps, we fed Middle-earth’s topography (land height) and bathymetry (ocean depth) into an advanced climate model.

Since Tolkien intended Middle-earth to be our own Earth at a distant point in the past, we assumed its physical parameters – such as the planetary radius, rotation rate, and distance from the Sun – were identical to ours. We then simulated the world’s climate.

The results were a remarkable confirmation of Tolkien’s intuitive worldbuilding.

The model predicted a climate similar to Western Europe and North Africa – unsurprising, given Tolkien’s geographical inspiration.

The highest precipitation fell on and to the west of the Misty Mountains, with a drier “rain-shadow” effect to the east. This effect is caused by prevailing westerly winds forcing moist air to rise and cool over the mountains, condensing water vapour into rain or snow before it reaches the eastern side.

The model’s prediction of extensive forest cover across much of Middle-earth was consistent with Elrond’s claim that in the past, squirrels could travel from the Shire to Dunland without touching the ground.

Climate scientist Dan Lunt first released this climate simulation in a fictional paper in 2013, and it became an unexpected success in the classroom. Educators used the exotic setting of Middle-earth to explain complex concepts underpinning weather and climate. They were able to relate this to the physical laws that govern why climate changes in the real world.

The unstable seasons of Westeros

One of the defining features of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is the unpredictable and prolonged seasons of Westeros. This unique climatic feature is not just backstory. It’s a crucial plot device, allowing the White Walkers to move southward across an ice-covered world.

Astrophysicists and climatologists have long nerded out over the possible cause. Theories have ranged from binary star systems to volcanic activity, but all have struggled to create a viable, habitable world.

We focused on the idea of a chaotically-varying axial tilt. On Earth, the stable tilt of our axis is what gives us regular seasons. We used a real-world climate model where the planet’s axis “tumbled” throughout the year, like a wobbly spinning top.

The result was striking: if the planet tumbled exactly once per orbit, one hemisphere would constantly face the sun in a fixed season, creating a permanent summer or winter.

But what causes the season to suddenly flip from a long summer to a long winter? The tilt of our planet’s axis is stabilised by the gravitational influence of its moon.

Martin’s world has only one moon, but legend says it once had two, until the second moon “wandered too close to the sun and it cracked from the heat”. The loss of a second moon may have caused the planet’s axis to become unstable, providing a plausible, physics-based explanation for the world’s greatest mysteries.

Building new worlds with climate science

The benefits of climate modelling are not limited to just filling gaps in classic stories.

Our models can also inform the worldbuilding of new fantasy realms. The work now published in our new paper started when climate communicator John Cook was developing an allegorical, speculative story exploring the denialist response to environmental damage.

He worked with climate scientists to simulate the climate of his fantasy world, Terrios. The subsequent model output provided concrete details such as temperature, precipitation, and wind conditions at every step along the characters’ journey through a variety of biomes.

This ensured the world was internally consistent and richly detailed, enhancing verisimilitude and creating a more immersive experience for the reader.

Ultimately, applying physics to fictional lands provides an engaging way to connect general audiences with complex environmental science.

By using climate models, scientists honour Tolkien’s demand that even the most fantastical worlds must maintain a credible, finely-tuned balance between the familiar laws of realism and the fantastic.

The enduring legacy of these simulated worlds proves that when science and art collide, the resulting discoveries can be just as compelling as the stories themselves.

John Cook, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne; Alex Farnsworth, Senior Research Associate in Meteorology, University of Bristol; Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, University of Bristol, and Dann Mitchell, Professor of Climate Science, University of Bristol

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

Having your period can be a painful experience.

Period pain, also known as dysmenorrhea, is a very common condition with around nine in ten young women aged 13 to 25 in Australia having regular period pain.

For many women, period pain can make exercise seem like an impossible task.

So should you avoid exercise if you have period pain? Or could exercising actually help?

What causes period pain?

There are two main types of period pain.

The most common is primary dysmenorrhea. This usually means painful cramps in the lower abdomen.

Research suggests this kind of period pain is caused by an increased number of prostaglandins. The body releases these hormone-like molecules when the lining of the uterus breaks down during the period. Prostaglandins can cause many different symptoms including period cramps, back or leg pain and loose bowels, also known as period poops.

The other type of period pain is secondary dysmenorrhea, which refers to pain caused by physical changes in the pelvis. One of the most common causes is endometriosis, a condition where tissue resembling uterine tissue grows in other parts of the body, leading to severe pain and fertility problems.

Can exercise reduce period pain?

Unfortunately, period pain is often difficult to treat. Many women don’t respond well to standard period pain treatments. These include non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen or mefenamic acid, also known as Ponstan.

This has led researchers to examine exercise as a way to reduce period pain symptoms. And there is some evidence suggesting that regular physical activity can reduce how severe period pain is, and how long it lasts.

Imagine you have a period pain scale from zero to ten, where zero means no pain and ten indicates the worst pain. Research from 2019 suggests exercise can reduce the severity of period pain by an average of 2.5 points. This makes exercise more effective than other self-treatment methods, such as using a heat pack.

However, we have only one 2017 study which directly compares the effects of exercise and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications on period pain. This means it’s hard to make any clear recommendations. But this study suggests regular exercise is at least as helpful as taking mefenamic acid.

Exercise may also reduce how long period pain lasts. One study from 2025 found aerobic exercise, which aims to increase your breathing and heart rate, can shorten the duration of period pain by more than 12 hours.

Many women experience the worst pain in the first 48 hours of their period, so a potential 25% cut in the duration of period pain is significant.

What kinds of exercise are best?

Most of the evidence examining exercise and period pain focuses on aerobic exercise. This includes cycling, swimming and jogging. A handful of studies look at strength training, yoga and relaxation exercises such as gentle stretching.

There is some evidence to suggest strength training relieves period pain more than other kinds of exercise. However, researchers generally study a specific kind of strength training known as isometric exercises. These involve holding muscles in a static position, such as doing a plank.

Other studies show exercises such as progressive muscle relaxation, which involves tensing and then relaxing particular muscles, can also be very effective. A 2024 study found women who did relaxation-based exercises, combined with self-massage, experienced the greatest reduction in pain. And because they’re simple to do, participants were more likely to stick with relaxation-based exercises compared to other kinds of physical activity.

But most of this research focuses on primary dysmenorrhea. So for those whose period pain may be caused by an underlying condition, it may be best to start with gentler forms of exercise such as yoga. You can also speak to an exercise physiologist to get personalised advice. This is because we don’t fully understand if more intense exercise has the same effect on period pain caused by other conditions, such as endometriosis.

When and how often should I exercise?

There isn’t much research looking at the effects of exercising specifically during the period. But a 2025 review of existing studies suggests exercising two to three times a week can reduce period pain.

This review found participants who did strength training for at least 30 minutes at a time, over a minimum of eight weeks, experienced the greatest reduction in pain. However, existing research suggests you may start seeing some improvements in both pain intensity and duration in as few as four weeks.

The research is less clear when it comes to aerobic exercise. A 2025 review suggests shorter and less intense sessions of aerobic exercise may be most effective for managing period pain.

So doing at least 90 minutes of exercise a week, for at least eight weeks, may be the best exercise-based way to reduce period pain. This seems to be the case whether you exercise during your period or not. But if you experience any negative symptoms after exercising, such as pain below your belly button when you’re not menstruating, it’s best to speak to a doctor.

The bottom line

Overall, exercise is one way women can manage period pain. Current research suggests any kind of exercise, ranging from yoga to more intense aerobic workouts, can reduce the severity and duration of period pain. So everyone can benefit from exercise, regardless what time of the month it is.

Mike Armour, Associate Professor at NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University

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

The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) has released its much-anticipated investigation into the six people referred by the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.

The report reveals the identity of the referred people, which was previously not public knowledge: five bureaucrats and former prime minister Scott Morrison, who was social services minister at the time.

NACC found that two of the six individuals (Mark Withnell and Serena Wilson) had committed serious corrupt conduct. Notably, Morrison had no findings of corruption made against him.

Why did NACC decide to investigate?

On July 6 2024, the Robodebt royal commission referred six people involved in the Robodebt scheme to the NACC.

Initially the NACC declined to investigate, stating that the issues had been fully ventilated by the royal commission.

Following hundreds of complaints from the public about this decision, the inspector of NACC conducted an investigation into NACC’s decision not to investigate. She found it was flawed due to the NACC’s commissioner’s conflict of interest with one of the referred persons.

Former High Court judge Geoffrey Nettle was then appointed in December 2024 to reconsider whether and how the NACC should deal with the referrals. Nettle determined each referral raised a corruption issue under the NACC act, and it was in the public interest for the NACC to conduct a corruption investigation.

This finally prompted the NACC to decide to investigate the matter. This investigation was conducted by a deputy commissioner, Kylie Kilgour, to avoid a conflict of interest.

NACC held private hearings for this investigation, where the six referred people and 33 witnesses were called to give evidence. There were no public hearings.

What were the main findings?

The investigation found that two of the six referred people had committed serious corrupt conduct.

The commission found that Mark Withnell (previously general manager of business integrity at the Department of Human Services) engaged in corrupt conduct by intentionally misleading officers of the Department of Social Services in 2015 in preparing a submission to the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet of the Robodebt scheme proposal.

It also found that Serena Wilson (previously secretary at the Department of Social Services) engaged in corrupt conduct by intentionally misleading the ombudsman in 2017 during the ombudsman’s own investigation into the Robodebt Scheme. Wilson had concealed from the ombudsman legal advice that the Robodebt scheme was unlawful, and made misleading statements about the scheme.

However, NACC also concluded there was insufficient admissible evidence to establish the alleged offences against either Withnell or Wilson beyond reasonable doubt. It was therefore not appropriate to refer them to the director of public prosecutions.

NACC found Scott Morrison did not engage in serious corrupt conduct. This was because he was entitled to rely on departmental advice. The report lays the responsibility for misleading Cabinet on the public servants.

Is this adequate?

Key admissions and statements made during NACC investigations are not admissible in criminal proceedings.

This is because anti-corruption commissions often have extraordinary powers to abrogate fundamental privileges that normally apply to legal proceedings. These include legal professional privilege, public interest immunity and the privilege against self-incrimination. These privileges are necessary in order to allow anti-corruption commissions to uncover acts of corruption without impediment.

However, the abrogation of privileges is always twinned with “use immunity”. This prevents the compelled evidence from being used against the individual in a criminal prosecution, ensuring it is used for investigation rather than for the punishment of that person.

On the one hand, we now have a full ventilation of the truth of the matter and the role of each person in this sorry saga, both through the Royal Commission and the NACC investigation. And we have findings these two public servants have engaged in serious corrupt conduct.

However, as the public servants are not likely to be criminally prosecuted, it is unclear what other repercussions there will be beyond reputational damage.

More tellingly, the Robodebt scheme has exposed fundamental failings in our system of public administration. Public servants have lost power over the decades, with the rise of ministerial advisers and senior bureaucrats being in fixed-term contracts and in constant fear of losing their jobs. As a result, it is more difficult for public servants to provide “frank and fearless advice” – they are instead often focused on pleasing the minister. In the case of Robodebt, the public servants manoeuvred to put together this unlawful scheme that has caused significant harm to hundreds of thousands of Australians.

The Robodebt royal commission lambasted the scheme as an “extraordinary saga” of “venality, incompetence and cowardice”.

We also have a situation where ministers are able to evade responsibility for these policy choices. This is because they have plausible deniability. They can simply use the phrase: “I was not advised”. As long as they are careful enough, they can simply blame their advisers when things go horribly wrong. Here, the minister who orchestrated the whole scheme is not fully held accountable.

The Robodebt scheme shows the rise of automation in government may lead to significant harm. Therefore, stronger safeguards are needed before we deploy such technologies.

The NACC’s investigation has provided us with detailed examination of the conduct of the six people who were primarily responsible for the Robodebt scheme. It has shown some of these actions have amounted to serious corrupt conduct.

But there are broader issues at stake here. If we want to avoid another Robodebt, the government needs to look at broader reform on automated government decision-making and measures to strengthen the public service.

Yee-Fui Ng, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University

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

On November 18 1909, greengrocer Claude Nam Shing was woken up by shouts of “fire”. He found his store, on the corner of Elizabeth and Melville Streets in central Hobart, ablaze.

He escaped quickly. The fire brigade arrived and the fire was doused. Nam Shing’s stock suffered little damage, unlike his neighbour’s paint shop. Hobart’s newspapers cheered, as such damage to these old buildings would surely hasten their replacement. Today on this corner stand several buildings dating back to 1914.

It’s stories like Nam Shing’s that we’ve been chronicling as part of our research project, called Everyday Heritage. We’ve been investigating the lives of Chinese migrants and their descendants in Tasmania in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After mapping 105 “Chinese” addresses across the centre of Hobart, we found these businesses were scattered across the whole city. So while Tasmania’s capital has never had a Chinatown like Melbourne or Sydney, the footprint of Chinese migration remains all over the city to this day.

White-washing the past

Claude Nam Shing was an immigrant from China who arrived in Australia in the mid-1890s, making Tasmania his home for more than 40 years. In the 1911 census, he was one of 353 men in Tasmania who reported China as their birthplace – a reduction of more than 30% from the state’s peak in 1891.

After federation, the Australian government introduced the White Australia Policy, a series of discriminatory laws and policies designed to limit non-white immigration and restrict the rights of non-white residents.

Some immigrants of colour and their families chose to leave Australia, while others sought new opportunities by joining larger communities in cities like Melbourne and Sydney.

This internal migration coincided with urban renewal that saw accidental fires tear through ramshackle wooden storefronts and investment in modernised streetscapes.

In places that never had the population density for a Chinatown, early Chinese communities might seem to leave little tangible trace. But such an absence does not necessarily mean the absence of a Chinese history.

Unearthing Hobart’s history

Our growing dataset comes from diverse historical sources including birth and marriage records, naturalisation records, newspapers and gravestones. We are extracting as many names, addresses, and dates as possible, so we can restore individuals and families of Chinese heritage to Tasmania’s history.

Most of the Chinese immigrants who came to Australia before the 1950s trace their heritage to the Pearl River Delta in southern Guangdong province.

In towns and cities across Australia, Chinese migrants built communities that were often based on networks of family and kinship, hometown origins and common dialects.

Those who came to Tasmania mostly came from one of two counties: Sunwui and Toishan (today known as Xinhui and Taishan in Mandarin), where the local dialects differ from the standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

By mapping shops and businesses we found in Tasmania’s Post Office Directories, we could see those networks in action as businesses changed hands over the years, but stayed within the Chinese community.

From fruiterers to fancy goods

On one street corner, Alfred Wood’s “fruiterer” business was sold to Peter Quon Goong in 1907, then to Kwong Hing two years later. Within three years, this shop was known as the “Chinese fruiterers”, distinguishing it from at least four other fruiterers within a few doors.

Near another corner of this block, we found one of several Chinese cabinetmakers, Ah Tye. He may have chosen this property because it placed him conveniently close to the F&E Crisp timber yards.

The block could have been dominated by these yards. They filled half of it, and it’s had such longevity that the new university building we work in is called The Forest.

Instead, we see an array of industries – bootmakers, blacksmiths and boarding houses – and retailers including those run by Chinese migrants.

Along with greengrocers and fruiterers, Chinese Tasmanians operated confectionery and gift shops, and what were known as “fancy goods” stores. These sold “exotic” imports, and personal and household items.

In the 1890s on this block was the store of Vong (or John) Boosuit, who started as a hawker of fancy goods before becoming successful enough to start a bricks-and-mortar business.

Boosuit married Selina Findon, the daughter of an English convict, and today their descendants include actor Patrick Brammall.

The only time we found Chinese businesses clustered together in Hobart was when they required specific infrastructure. There were a few small groups of laundries tucked around the city, in locations we assume had a reliable water supply and enough space for drying washing.

Driving community spirit

Tasmania’s newspapers tell of the generosity of Chinese migrants towards their new home. Their shops not only served Hobart’s residents, they were also community hubs.

For nearly half a century, the fruiterers at Ah Ham & Co organised an annual fundraising drive for the main Hobart hospital, despite rarely using the hospital themselves.

Migrants and their children in a small city were comfortable moving between two of its most active cultures – British and Chinese.

Between 2011 and 2021, the population of central Hobart that speaks a language other than English at home nearly doubled, from 12.5% to 24%.

Rather than viewing this as a radical change for Australia’s island capital, it reads more as a rekindling of a history that was interrupted for more than 70 years by the White Australia Policy.

As we walk through the multicultural bustle of our inner-city university campus, we are following streets that were home to successful laundries, fancy good stores, tobacconists, fruiterers, grocers and restaurants run by immigrants well into the 20th century.

The descendants of Australia’s earliest Chinese migrants, many of whom still live in our rural and regional areas, should be proud of the central role their ancestors played in creating the towns and cities we have today. The built heritage may have gone or be hidden, but their stories linger waiting to be found in the written record.

Imogen Wegman, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania; Annaliese Claydon, Adjunct Researcher, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, and Kate Bagnall, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania

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

We’ve all been there. Whether it’s at a crucial moment of an exam, walking into a room for a specific purpose, or making an impromptu speech, your mind goes blank.

It can be frustrating, stressful or worrying.

But what’s really going on in your brain? And when should you go to your GP for a check-up?

What is mind blanking?

One of the earliest observations in psychology is that our thoughts usually produce a stream of consciousness, flowing almost constantly.

Often our attention and thoughts are focused. Other times, our mind wanders.

But less often (perhaps about 15% of the time) our mind goes completely blank. So in recent years, researchers have begun trying to find out why.

Mind blanking can happen when we intend to retrieve a memory, and find it gone. This could be completely forgetting the answers to questions in an exam, or forgetting why we walked into a room.

It can also happen when we are not aware of thinking at all. Someone might ask us a question, and we realise we had “zoned out”.

Sometimes this zoning out is due to our mind wandering, and we are aware of our thoughts. However, at other times, when we’re not sure where our mind went, this is mind blanking.

Some people are much more likely than others to say their mind goes blank. These include people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) or anxiety.

Mind blanking is also more common in certain kinds of dementia, such as Lewy body dementia, and in people who are sleep deprived, or after intense physical exercise.

Let’s start with the brain

To understand what causes our mind to go blank, we need to start with how our brain usually pays attention and learns new memories.

A key brain network involved in these processes is the executive attention network. This is a network of interconnected brain regions that’s important for being alert, paying attention and feeling motivated.

These brain areas are connected to regions in the outer layer of the brain, the frontal and parietal cortex, which support our planning, decision-making and sensory integration.

This executive attention network is used both for passing information to our memory systems for storage, and then later retrieving those memories when we need them.

One of the key brain chemicals that supports this network is noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine. This controls our alertness and readiness for action.

So what happens when our mind goes blank?

Disruption in any part of the executive attention network can impact the brain’s ability to pay attention and retrieve memories, leading to a blank mind.

When we’re sleep-deprived

Fatigue caused by sleep deprivation or sleep disorders can impact the alerting part of the network.

When we are very tired, we can experience “local sleep”. This is where the activity in parts of our brains is sleep-like even if we are awake. This can cause the attention system to temporarily shut off, which researchers think may lead to mind blanks.

Neuroimaging research shows parts of the executive attention network are “deactivated” during mind blanking.

This likely explains what causes the “zoning out” kind of mind blank.

When we’re stressed

High levels of stress or anxiety, such as what we might experience in an exam room, can result in high levels of noradrenaline. This puts the body in “fight or flight mode”.

This focuses our attention on immediate threats, reducing its ability to retrieve what it sees as non-essential memories, such as information you’ve been revising the day before.

When we’re multi-tasking

If the executive attention network doesn’t encode a memory efficiently in the first place – because for example, we were multi-tasking or distracted – then it might not be easily retrieved later on. This can also lead to a mind blank.

When is it time to see your GP?

While mind blanking is common and usually no cause for concern, frequent mind blanking can be a sign of a medical condition.

Some conditions that affect these attention network systems, include depression, anxiety, dementia or stroke. A condition that affects the memory systems themselves, such as Alzheimer’s disease, can also look like mind blanking, as can some kinds of seizures.

So, generally speaking, if you’ve noticed mind blanking becoming more common, if there has been a sudden onset of symptoms, or if your friends or family have raised concerns, see your GP for a check-up.

If you’ve noticed any changes to your ability to undertake your daily activities, or you find yourself confused or disorientated, you should also see your GP.

If you go to your GP for a check-up, they may take a medical history, and ask you some questions to assess your thinking and memory skills.

They may also refer you for neuropsychological or neurological assessment, or request a brain scan (like a CT or MRI scan) to check for any brain changes caused by stroke or dementia.

Sophie Andrews, Associate Professor and Lead, Healthy Brain Ageing Research Program, Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

Unwanted, unsolicited marketing emails, texts and instant messages feel like an unavoidable fact of modern life. But there are actually legal restrictions on spamming that apply to every business selling to Australian shoppers.

Clothing company Lululemon Athletica Australia just paid a A$702,900 penalty for infringing those rules when it sent more than 370,000 emails without an unsubscribe option.

This is how you can stop or report persistent marketing spam – and why we need to tighten those rules even further.

What do Australia’s anti-spam rules say?

The rules of the Spam Act are fairly straightforward.

First, the law prohibits a person or business from sending unsolicited commercial “electronic messages”: emails, texts or instant messages. That means a business must have a person’s consent before sending them marketing messages.

Second, the Spam Act makes it a rule for any person or business sending a commercial message to include an option to unsubscribe from future messages.

The unsubscribe function has to be clear and work for at least 30 days. And it mustn’t require a person to provide additional personal information, or login or sign up for a user account, to opt out.

The rules apply when the sender or recipient of the message is located in Australia.

However, there are some exceptions. The rules don’t apply to messages from certain kinds of entities: registered charities, educational institutions, government bodies and, most controversially, registered political parties.

How can you report marketing spam?

Anyone who thinks they’ve received a message that doesn’t meet the rules can complain to the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Even if you don’t want to make a complaint, you can still report it by:

• forwarding email spam to report@submit.spam.acma.gov.au (do not change the subject line or add any text)
• forwarding SMS or MMS spam to 0429 999 888 (standard message charges apply).

If ACMA finds a business has violated the rules, they can face hefty fines.

Last year, Tabcorp was fined $4 million for non-compliant SMS and WhatsApp messages to its VIP customers.

Telstra also paid a $626,000 penalty for sending more than 10 million text messages that did not comply with Australia’s spam laws.

The year before, the Commonwealth Bank landed a $7.5 million fine for sending millions of marketing messages without people’s consent or a working unsubscribe option. It was the bank’s second major breach of the spam rules, after it was fined $3.55 million in 2023.

Why Lululemon was fined

In its latest case, announced this week, ACMA found Lululemon Athletica Australia failed to provide an unsubscribe option in thousands of messages sent between 1 December 2024 and 5 January 2025. (The company is a local subsidiary of global “athleisure” brand Lululemon, based in Canada.)

As a result, Lululemon here in Australia was fined $702,900. It also agreed to take steps to ensure future compliance, including appointing an independent consultant to review its procedures, training personnel, and reporting on compliance to ACMA.

Which messages are covered by the Spam Act?

Interestingly, Lululemon initially argued its messages were not subject to the anti-spam rules.

The rules only apply to commercial messages: when one of the purposes of the message is to advertise, promote or offer to supply goods or services. This won’t include purely factual communications about a good or service you’ve purchased, such as delivery updates, payment reminders, notices of product faults.

Lululemon pointed out that its messages contained factual information, sent for transactional purposes.

Importantly, however, they also contained links back to Lululemon’s website and social media pages. The links had titles like “shop accessories”. That was enough to trigger the Spam Act rules.

ACMA noted its enforcement action against Lululemon was the fifth in 18 months against a business that “incorrectly treated messages as non-commercial”.

Tighter rules are overdue

The line between factual, marketing and entertainment content is increasingly hard to discern online.

However, as ACMA’s recent actions make clear, the Spam Act is clear on this point. A message may have multiple purposes – but if one is to advertise, promote or offer goods or services, the rules will apply.

Still, the kinds of messages captured by the spam legislation are a mere drop in the ocean of digital advertising we encounter everyday elsewhere online including our social media feeds. Ads are tailored and targeted to each of us in real-time, using vast amounts of data.

Back in 2022, the federal Attorney-General’s department recommended updating Australia’s privacy laws to adapt to modern digital advertising.

If implemented, those changes would give consumers more choices to opt out of the broader range of targeted advertising we see. It would also improve transparency about the use of profiling in advertising, and add restrictions on using sensitive information.

The current Spam Act has been in place since 2003. The online advertising ecosystem has shifted dramatically over the past 20 years.

While ACMA’s recent enforcement actions demonstrate the continued relevance and need for education about anti-spamming laws, updating those laws is now long overdue.

Tegan Cohen, Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer, Faculty of Business & Law, Queensland University of Technology

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

Humans evolved in an atmosphere containing roughly 200–300 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Today, that figure sits above 420 ppm, higher than at any point in the history of our species.

We know this extra CO₂ is contributing to climate change, but could it also be changing the chemistry of our bodies?

In our recently published research we looked at two decades of information from one of the biggest health datasets in the world to start answering this question. We found some concerning trends.

What we found

We analysed blood chemistry data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which collected samples from about 7,000 Americans every two years between 1999 and 2020. We looked at three markers: CO₂, calcium and phosphorus.

CO₂ is mainly carried in blood in the form of bicarbonate (HCO₃⁻).

When CO₂ enters the blood, it is converted to bicarbonate. This process largely occurs inside red blood cells, and also produces hydrogen ions.

During short-term exposure to increased CO₂, this can make blood more acidic, and result in a modest increase in bicarbonate levels in the blood (to reduce acidity).

If the exposure continues for a long time the kidneys reduce the amount of bicarbonate lost in urine and also produce more bicarbonate. This has the net effect of higher bicarbonate levels in the blood, to counteract the persistent acidity.

Levels of calcium and phosphorus in the blood may also be affected, as they too play a role in regulating acidity in the blood. These processes are completely normal.

Over the 21 years from 1999 to 2020, we found that average blood bicarbonate levels rose by about 7%. Over the same period, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations rose by a similar proportion.

Meanwhile, blood calcium levels dropped by about 2% and phosphorus by around 7%.

If these trends continue, blood bicarbonate levels may exceed healthy levels in around 50 years. Calcium and phosphorus levels may fall below healthy levels, too, by the end of the century.

Our hypothesis is that rising CO₂ exposure could be contributing to these trends.

What’s causing the changes?

It’s important to be clear about what this study does and doesn’t show. It identifies population-level trends in blood chemistry that parallel rising atmospheric CO₂.

But correlation is not causation. The study does not adjust for factors such as diet, kidney function, diuretic use or obesity, which can influence the measurements and should be considered in future analyses.

There are other plausible contributors. One important consideration is indoor air.

Participants in the NHANES study likely spend most of their time indoors, where CO₂ concentrations often exceed 1,000 ppm in poorly ventilated spaces. Other studies show time spent indoors has increased over the past two decades.

The NHANES dataset doesn’t capture this parameter, so we can’t directly assess this contribution. However, if more time indoors is contributing, it means total CO₂ exposure is rising even faster than atmospheric trends suggest. This arguably reinforces rather than alleviates the concern.

Other factors, such as shifting dietary patterns, changing rates of obesity, differences in physical activity and even variations in sample collection or processing across survey cycles, could also be important.

Can our bodies cope?

Some critics have argued that, based on what we know about how our bodies manage blood chemistry, we should have no trouble compensating for future increases in atmospheric CO₂, even under worst-case climate scenarios. For example, the lungs can increase ventilation and the kidneys can adjust to produce more bicarbonate.

For most healthy individuals, small long-term increases in outdoor CO₂ are not expected to meaningfully change the levels of bicarbonate, calcium or phosphorus in the blood.

This makes the population-level trends we observed puzzling. They could reflect a confounding rather than a direct CO₂ effect, but they do highlight how little data we have on long-term, real-world exposure.

A lack of long-term data

The argument that we can cope easily with higher CO₂ is based on short-term responses. Whether the same reasoning applies when CO₂ levels are higher across a person’s entire life remains largely untested.

There is, however, a growing body of evidence across many species which shows that even modest, environmentally relevant increases in CO₂ can produce subtle but measurable physiological effects.

In humans, short-term exposure at concentrations commonly found indoors (1,000–2,500 ppm) has been linked to reduced cognitive performance and changes in brain activity, though the mechanisms aren’t fully understood.

These new findings highlight a gap in evidence about long-term, real-world CO₂ exposure and human physiology. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t any studies assessing the physiological effects of breathing slightly elevated CO₂ over a lifetime.

This is particularly important for children, who will experience the longest cumulative exposure. And that’s why it’s vital to investigate this area further.

What this means

Our findings are not suggesting people will become suddenly unwell when atmospheric CO₂ reaches a certain level. What the data show is a signal that warrants attention.

If rising atmospheric CO₂ is contributing to gradual shifts in blood chemistry at a population level, then the composition of the atmosphere should be monitored alongside traditional climate indicators as a potential factor in long-term public health.

Reducing CO₂ emissions remains crucial for limiting global warming. Our findings suggest it may also be important for safeguarding aspects of human health that we’re only just beginning to understand.

Alexander Larcombe, Associate Professor and Head of Respiratory Environmental Health, The Kids Research Institute Australia; Curtin University and Philip Bierwirth, Emeritus Research Associate, Australian National University

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

Every pregnant woman wants to deliver a healthy baby. During labour and birth, women also want to feel listened to and respected, and to come out of the experience physically and emotionally well.

But around 28% of Australian women describe their most recent birth as traumatic.

Birth trauma can include fear for their life or their baby’s life, a loss of control, damage to the perineum or pelvic floor, disrespectful care, or mistreatment from health care providers.

Our new research paper examined birth outcomes and both physical and psychological experiences of women and babies who experienced five different types (or models) of care in Australia during the COVID pandemic.

We found that seeing the same midwife or team of midwives was associated with lower rates of intervention and birth trauma, compared with standard care.

And for some women, private obstetric care also led to lower rates of birth trauma than standard care in the public system. Let’s take a look.

Five main models of care

Most Australian women receive standard public care or GP shared care.

In standard public care, women see rotating hospital staff (midwives, obstetricians and at times, trainees) throughout pregnancy and often give birth with a midwife or doctor they’ve never met.

GP shared care is when there is an arrangement between a GP and hospital. Women see their GP most during pregnancy and hospital staff for some antenatal appointments. The GP doesn’t usually attend the birth, except in some rural, remote regions.

In continuity of care models, one or a small number of midwives and obstetricians deliver the majority of the care before, during and after birth. This includes continuity of:

• midwifery care in the public system
• private obstetric care
• private midwifery care.

When given a choice, women favour continuity of care models.

What our study found

Our study looked at the experiences of 3,682 Australian women who gave birth in 2020 and 2021.

Compared to women who had standard care, we found that those who had continuity of midwifery care (through the public system or a private midwife) were:

• less likely to be induced or have an oxytocin drip to speed up labour
• much more likely to have a vaginal birth
• more likely to have the midwife visit them at home after the birth
• less likely to have a caesarean section
• less likely to have their baby admitted to special or neonatal intensive care or receive formula in hospital when they had chosen to breastfeed
• half as likely to describe their birth as traumatic.

These differences were seen even after adjusting for differences in the groups that could affect outcomes, such as women’s age, medical risk, education, employment status, country of birth, income and mental health.

These findings line up with decades of evidence. A 2024 Cochrane review of 17 randomised controlled trials found midwifery continuity of care models reduce some birth interventions, including caesarean section, forceps and vacuum birth, and episiotomy (surgical cut to the perineum).

Our study also found that while women who had private obstetric care had higher rates of birth intervention, they had lower rates of birth trauma when compared to standard care. There was no difference in outcomes for the baby, such as admission to special care or neonatal intensive care.

This suggests when women’s choices align with their care provider’s philosophy, outcomes are better – even if intervention levels are higher. Some women seek, or are not concerned about, increased obstetric intervention. Continuity itself, regardless of who the lead health care professional is, reduces birth trauma.

What are the study’s limitations?

As with any study there are limitations. This study relied on women reporting their labour and birth outcomes, so there could be difficulties with recall that affected reporting of some health risks and other important information.

A high proportion of women responding (86%) were born in Australia and spoke English at home (92%) and only 2% were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, meaning the diversity of the Australian population is not represented.

We did not examine stillbirth or neonatal deaths as all the women responding to the survey had a live baby. So people still could have had those experiences but they weren’t captured in our data.

Why does continuity of care make a difference?

Continuity gives women a stable, familiar guide who knows their story, understands their concerns and advocates for them when the system is under strain.

It also allows for the kind of personalised care women consistently say they want and which midwives wish they could deliver more often.

Nearly half of all models of care (49%) have a midwife as the designated carer, with 16% having midwifery continuity of care throughout the maternity period.

However, midwifery continuity of care models are more common in urban centres and can be harder to access in rural and remote areas. Even in urban centres, not everyone who wants to access them can. The popularity of these programs means they fill up fast and many women miss out if they don’t book in when they are first pregnant.

Private obstetric and private midwifery models of care come with out of pocket costs and are not available everywhere. There are few private midwives and many struggle to get admitting rights into hospitals like doctors have.

The recent New South Wales Birth Trauma Inquiry recommended expanding continuity of care models to help reduce the high rates of birth trauma in Australia. Our study shows that this could make a significant difference.

Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University; Hazel Keedle, Associate Professor of Midwifery, Western Sydney University, and Kingsley Emwinyore Agho, Professor of Biostatistics and Global Health, Western Sydney University

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

Over the past two years, viral clips, news headlines and TV series such as Adolescence have ensured much of the public has encountered the “manosphere” – an online ecosystem that repackages misogyny, anti-feminism and male grievance as self-improvement and hustle.

Journalist Louis Theroux is further lifting the lid on this dangerous ideology with his new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, in which he showcases the individuals driving this culture.

In his measured and sometimes risky style, Theroux traces not only the rhetoric of “high-value men”, but also the livestream formats and business models that sustain this world. The result is both illuminating and unsettling.

An insidious ideology

What emerges in Theroux’s exposé is not just provocation, but a clear misogynistic worldview. Across interviews and through influencers’ own content, we see the defence of a regressive gender hierarchy – and attempts to restore it.

Women are described as having innate value through their beauty and sexuality, yet dismissed as less rational and emotionally stable. Monogamy is framed as binding for women, but optional for men. Gender equality is blamed for cultural decline.

At times the language is openly authoritarian. Infamous influencer Myron Gaines describes himself to Theroux as a “dictator” in his romantic relationship. He casts intimacy as something he permits, and domestic care as something owed to men.

But Gaines also rejects that he is a misogynist; he claims he loves women, but that women don’t know what they want, and must be led.

The hypocrisy is striking. Several manosphere figures such as Harrison Sullivan publicly deride women who use platforms such as OnlyFans, while claiming to privately profit from managing their accounts.

Misogyny as a business model

Theroux also shows how the audiences of these influencers form.

In one early scene, young boys who look to be around tween age (with blurred faces) repeat lines about hating women and gay people with unsettling ease. Later, young adult men speak of having “no value” unless they accumulate wealth, status and dominance. Working a nine-to-five job is framed as submission to the “matrix” and the “hustle” as freedom.

The complaint that stable work no longer guarantees security will resonate with many. But in the manosphere, economic strain becomes personal failure: if you are struggling, you have not worked hard enough. This is not just ideology. It is a business model.

Subscription “academies”, private groups and coaching schemes convert insecurity into income. In one example from the documentary, we see American influencer Justin Waller promoting The Real World – an online university run by his close friend and business partner Andrew Tate (who is currently facing charges of rape and human trafficking in multiple countries).

Young men and boys are told they are deficient unless wealthy, muscular and emotionally invulnerable, and then charged for access to the mindset said to fix them. The hierarchy that elevates dominant men and denigrates women simultaneously and exploitatively monetises the boys beneath it.

The worldview is not confined to provocation. In one segment, Waller’s partner Kristen explains that she feels fulfilled staying in her “lane”, and caring for the children and home, while he occupies his role as provider and leader.

She speaks warmly of their respective “masculine and feminine energies”, presenting inequality not as constraint but as comfort – despite viewers learning she has no legal right to his wealth as they are not legally married.

Breeding ground for conspiracies

Running alongside the hustle narrative is a thread of conspiracy theorising. The “matrix” is invoked as a metaphor for societal and institutional systems said to keep men compliant and blind to alternative paths to power.

From there it darkens into talk of shadowy elites engineering cultural decline, including “moral” decline and the erosion of men’s place in the world (which they bizarrely link to the growth of pedophilia).

The “manfluencers”, notably Sullivan and Gaines, suggest recent political developments – such as the rise of President Trump – vindicate their worldview.

Theroux’s instinct is to return to the manfluencers’ own accounts of absent fathers and unstable upbringings. That humanising impulse tilts the story toward sympathy and, problematically, to trauma as a key explanation.

But misogyny does not require trauma to flourish, nor are most boys who experience hardship drawn into sexist worldviews. These ideas are ideological and structural, with long-standing gender hierarchies repackaged and broadcast at scale.

The real-life consequences

Inside the Manosphere does acknowledge harms to women, but doesn’t dwell on it very long.

One segment on schools uses news clips from English-speaking countries to signal the spread of misogynistic language among boys. But the documentary could have done more to highlight these significant manosphere-inspired flow-on effects.

Research I conducted with Stephanie Wescott and colleagues extensively documents how manosphere narratives have permeated schools internationally. This has resulted in higher levels of harassment and gender-based violence by some boys against girl peers and women teachers, eroding women’s workplace safety and girls’ participation.

Theroux is right to suggest we are all, in some sense, now living inside the manosphere. Understanding what drives the men at its centre matters – as does focusing on the real-world harms they cause.

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is on Netlix from today.

Steven Roberts, Professor of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Monash University

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

A theory about male “sexual market value” that began in online manosphere forums is now appearing in the TikTok feeds of Australian teenagers — repackaged as AI-powered “looksmaxxing” apps.

The idea is closely tied to the incel (“involuntary celibate”) subculture. These are loose online communities of mostly young men who believe they are unable to form romantic or sexual relationships with women.

Within these spaces, users often rank men according to physical attractiveness and argue that dating success is largely determined by genetics. This worldview is sometimes called “the blackpill”.

Our research suggests that, by scoring faces and suggesting ways people can “optimise” their appearance, looksmaxxing tools are quietly mainstreaming a toxic view of masculinity and monetising insecurities.

Looksmaxxing is mainstreaming misogynistic incel ideology

Looksmaxxing describes an extreme physical optimisation of a person’s appearance, usually within a numerical rating system known as the PSL-scale.

Our TikTok network analysis reveals a dominant subculture around this concept, with so called “blackpill edits” at its heart. These usually show a conventionally less attractive person who is “mogged” (physically dominated based on looks) by a contrast with a person deemed attractive in the looksmaxxing community.

Such edits generate massive reach. One looksmaxxing influencer garnered more than 100 million views in 2025 alone.

Besides blackpill edits, the community also shares tutorial videos purportedly helping to improve one’s appearance. These include such dubious tips as recommending “mewing” (adjusting tongue posture) for a stronger jawline.

The looksmaxxing app economy

Within this ecosystem, we identified more than a dozen smartphone apps that promise to help users on their looksmaxxing journey. Essentially, all these apps offer the same service.

A user uploads a recent selfie, which an artificial intelligence (AI) model scans for arcane metrics such as “gonial angle”, “maxilla ratio” and “mentolabial angle”.

The user is then provided with an attractiveness score, and an associated rank on the PSL scale. Then, users receive a supposedly personalised assessment of their “potential”. The apps also offer generic fitness and dietary advice, but also recommendations of more niche practices such as mewing.

Monetising insecurity

Most apps hide their core features behind weekly subscriptions, usually priced around A$6. To attract paying customers, these apps are advertised in video descriptions (“Make your own reality @UmaxApp”), as well as in blackpill edits, for example by flashing rating screenshots between video clips.

Quantification, gamification and reframing

These apps are an active vector for mainstreaming an appealing version of formerly niche incel beliefs. While the focus on self-improvement seems to contradict the extreme fatalism present in dedicated incel forums, the apps act as a gateway, making harmful assumptions accessible through three key mechanisms.

First is quantification.

Incels believe every person has a “sexual market value”, usually expressed on a scale from one to ten. Looksmaxxing apps use the PSL-scale (running from one to eight), but the concept is identical: a user’s face is assigned numerical scores based on obscure calculations, reducing human worth to an AI assessment.

Second is gamification.

Scores are tied to specific ranks that often reflect key incel language, such as “low-tier normie” or “chadlite”. Much like a video game, the apps promise users the ability to “ascend” to a higher rank.

Unlike passively reading incel ideology in a web forum, these apps allow users to directly engage with the ideology by having their own faces assessed.

The third mechanism is reframing.

A key part of the success of these apps is that they provide a “recipe for ascension” instead of the traditional stream of blackpill fatalism. This makes these apps attractive to young men struggling with confidence. It’s worth noting, however, that alongside ordinary celebrities looksmaxxing ads sometimes include AI-generated versions of rich, famous sex abusers such as Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Coombs (better known as Diddy).

However, besides the reframing, the underlying assumptions are still rooted within incel ideology: a person’s ascension potential is limited and dictated by biology.

To illustrate, we observed young boys posting their selfies in the comment section of app advertisments, asking for others to rate them. In exchange, they were sometimes asked to “ropemax” – an incel term for committing suicide – if deemed incapable of ascension.

Looksmaxxing apps as a potential funnel to violence

Beyond the reframing, the foundation of looksmaxxing in underlying violent incel ideology can become quite explicit.

In a recent TikTok interaction we documented, a looksmaxxing influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers responded via video format to a user comment. The user’s profile picture was a photo of Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings, and a celebrated “saint” within the incel community. A subsequent comment pointing out this dark connection received more than 20,000 likes.

The particular danger at hand is that looksmaxxing apps, through the mainstreaming mechanisms described above, actively target vulnerable individuals struggling with self-confidence, drawing them into a harmful and potentially violent ideology.

Looksmaxxing apps might seem like an easy cash grab fuelled by young boys going through puberty. But as long as they remain openly accessible in app stores, using viral TikTok edits to reach a massive audience, they can function as a potential radicalisation pipeline into extremist incel worldviews.

Marten Risius, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland; Christopher David, Research Associate in Online Extremism, Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences, and Daline Ostermaier, Research assistant, Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

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

Australia regularly makes global headlines for its strict biosecurity rules for international travellers.

Failing to declare food, animal products and plant material – from an apple, to forgotten McMuffins or plant cuttings – can result in fines of up to A$6,600, potential prosecution and cancellations of visitor visas.

There are good reasons for those rules: Australia has managed to keep its environment and agriculture free of many invasive pests and diseases. Yet the volume of goods coming into Australia makes it hard to catch everything, especially biosecurity threats coming in on ships.

And that’s a problem – because if tonnes of illegal tobacco keep getting past our border security, undetected, we risk increased exposure to invasive pests that could cost our farmers billions.

Why tobacco is a biosecurity risk

The social and economic problems caused by Australia’s illegal tobacco trade have been widely reported, including ongoing firebombings, shootings and intimidation targeting tobacco retailers across several states.

But while the scale of the booming illicit trade is well known, its biosecurity risks have received little public attention. This is a significant omission.

Around 575 tonnes of illegal tobacco products – cigarettes, loose leaf tobacco and vapes – were produced in Australia in 2024-25, according to official estimates.

But far more – an estimated 3,312 to 5,397 tonnes in the same year – was imported. It arrives mainly on ships coming in via China, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

About 2,244 tonnes of that was seized in 2024-25. So thousands of tonnes more have been getting in undetected.

Illicit tobacco is a dried plant product and a biosecurity risk in its own right. The Australian government also lists tobacco as a potential carrier of many pests that pose significant threats to our agriculture and environment.

Khapra beetle: a high-impact hitchhiker

One such pest is the khapra beetle, a known hitchhiker on ships.

This tiny insect, just 1.6–3mm long, infests grain and other dry organic material, rendering it unfit for human or animal consumption. It’s the number one biosecurity threat to Australia’s $26 billion grain industry.

An incursion of khapra beetle would result in loss of access to key overseas markets, estimated at more than $15 billion over 20 years. Prevention is critical.

Native to India, khapra beetles have spread around the world in a wide variety of products, from food (such as rice) and other products (such as a box of children’s nappy pants in Australia last year), to packaging and machinery.

The larvae are exceptionally resilient and can hibernate in sea containers for years.

Khapra beetle has been detected numerous times at our border, with a marked increase in 2020. Those extra detections came after the federal government introduced emergency measures to address the growing risk of khapra beetles arriving in sea containers.

One notable detection was in 2007, when a couple who had migrated from the United Kingdom found khapra beetles in belongings that had spent six weeks at sea.

The woman discovered beetles inside a mug and, worse, larvae in her wrapped wedding dress. It turned out many other belongings were infested. The entire two-storey house was shrink-wrapped in plastic and fumigated.

Importantly, it was a successful eradication, and the grain industry was protected.

How illegal tobacco raises the risks of invasive pests

Any trade that’s illegal is more likely to use sea containers that are not cleaned, fumigated or adequately documented.

Added to this, tobacco is often sourced from high-risk regions with fake declarations.

In addition to khapra beetles, other pests could be introduced from imported tobacco.

One example is insecticide-resistant tobacco beetles. These beetles are common in Australian grain storages as well as households. However, the introduction of resistant strains could make it more difficult to control in museums, galleries and libraries – where they can cause severe damage to preserved animal specimens or book-bindings – as well as in household pantries.

Citizen scientists have reported the presence of tobacco beetles more than 200 times using the free MyPestGuide Reporter photo app. This tool was developed by Dr Darryl Hardie and one of us (Rob Emery) to make it easier for the public to report pests they find in various household commodities, including in their tobacco.

Community vigilance, combined with strong border controls, remain essential for protecting Australia from the biosecurity consequences of illicit imports.

Why we need to boost detection at our ports

Public debate about curbing illegal tobacco sales has largely focused on state government enforcement efforts. However, the first, most effective line of defence is at the border.

The relatively low interception rate for a bulky and easily recognisable commodity such as tobacco raises broader questions about our ability to detect less visible threats – like tiny beetles – that may carry even greater biosecurity risks.

Investment in maintaining and strengthening Australia’s border biosecurity must remain a national priority. Detection of illicit tobacco arriving at our ports urgently needs to improve.

Failure to implement effective biosecurity controls across all Australian ports exposes our environment and our farmers to risks worth billions of dollars.

Thanks to Dr Darryl Hardie for his contribution to this article.

Simon McKirdy, Professor of Biosecurity and Deputy Vice Chancellor of Global Engagement, Murdoch University; Lotti Tajouri, Associate Professor, Genomics and Molecular Biology, Biomedical Sciences, Bond University; Murdoch University, and Rob Emery, Associate Professor, Centre for Biosecurity and One Health, Murdoch University

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

Nationals leader David Littleproud has unexpectedly quit his post, declaring he is “buggered” and “out on my feet”.

His announcement came as a shock to colleagues and follows a period of extreme turbulence for his party and the Coalition, which split twice during this term.

Littleproud has been a controversial and, in terms of Coalition relations, provocative, leader. Although the Nationals held their lower house seats at the election, since then two of their high profile MPs have defected. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price went to the Liberals immediately after the election, and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce jumped to One Nation.

A dramatic surge in the support for One Nation in recent months has put Littleproud under intense pressure to try to combat that party’s increasing attraction to many voters who formerly supported the Nationals.

Littleproud had a bad relationship with former Liberal leader Sussan Ley and triggered both fractures between the two parties.

He has been much closer to the new Liberal leader, Angus Taylor, under whom relations between the parties have so far been smooth.

The Nationals will meet at 10am Wednesday to replace Littleproud. They need to do so quickly, as they have a candidate running in the May 9 byelection in Ley’s former seat of Farrer. On early indications, the Nationals have almost no chance of winning the seat, which former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer held for them before Ley.

Nationals senator Ross Cadell told Sky News the leadership contenders could be deputy leader Kevin Hogan, former leader Michael McCormack, who served as deputy prime minister, outspoken backbencher Matt Canavan and Senate leader Bridget McKenzie. Littleproud did not endorse a successor.

Later Hogan said in a statement: “After being approached by a number of my colleagues, I have formally put my hand up for the Leadership position.”

Canavan said he would run. “I believe I have the best chance to help win the battle for an Australia first plan that can deliver a better life for all Australians.”

Sources confirmed McKenzie was likely to stand.

Littleproud, who did not announce his plan at the Nationals’ regular party meeting on Tuesday, held a news conference after question time with his wife Amelia at his side.

He said he would stay on in his regional Queensland seat of Maranoa, including re-contesting it at the next election. He left open the possibility of serving on the shadow frontbench.

Despite internal and external criticism of his performance, Littleproud’s leadership position did not appear to be under any threat. One of his techniques for retaining support was to take every decision, however small, to the party room.

At his news conference, he defended his record saying, “I am proud of us recapturing our identity, for who we are and what we stand for. For that 30% of Australians who live outside a capital city.”

He said he had done this with the Voice (when the Nationals preempted the Liberals with their opposition) and on other policy areas, including net zero. “It’s not probably since John McEwen has the National Party leader had to stand up and show the courage of their character and […] stand for what their party room wants them to stand for. So I’m proud but I’m tired.”

“It is time for me to feel normal again, it has been a pretty rough road since the election.”

Littleproud was highly critical when asked about working with Ley. He said it was a mistake after the election to “wipe all our policies because all we did was leave a vacuum for someone to walk into.

"I stood and fought for those four policies that meant so much for our party room. […] I wasn’t going to let them go.

"And then [after the Nationals defied shadow cabinet solidarity] I was not going to stand by while my mates got punted for not doing anything wrong.

"Where I come from, if one of your mob gets knocked over and it is not for the right reason, you come swinging back. That is how we operate. The culture of National Party has always been like that. I am proud of that.”

Littleproud said to go on as leader “would be the wrong thing for me to do. I love the National Party. I grew up in it, I’ll bleed, to the day I die, green and gold, I love it, and it’d be wrong for me to say that I’m the right person to continue to lead. That’s tough for me to say, [that] I think someone better can do it, because I don’t have the energy. I’m out of my feet. I’m done.”

Barnaby Joyce, who said Littleproud’s ostracising of him was one reason for defecting, blasted Littleproud. He told The Australian: “Mr Littleproud has to accept responsibility for the existential crisis he left the National Party in.

"When I heard he said he was proud of what he achieved and compared himself to Black Jack [John] McEwen, I didn’t know whether that was pathos or AI interfering with my news.

"We had senior people leave such as David Gillespie, Keith Pitt, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. We had a [Senate] seat that was lost, which was Perin Davey. Two people who basically walked out in myself and Andrew Gee, and Jacinta.”

Taylor described Littleproud as a “committed Coalitionist”.

Nationals federal president Andrew Fraser said: “I congratulate David on his personal strength and conviction that saw The Nationals lead the debate on the Voice and on the development and adoption of an energy and climate policy that will meet our future energy needs and allow Australian businesses to thrive.

"We are not a faction of the Liberal Party; we have a partnership, and David’s leadership never let them forget it.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

The war in Iran has once again exposed how vulnerable the world’s energy markets are to geopolitical disruption. In wild swings, benchmark crude oil prices spiked as high as US$120 per barrel, roughly 50% higher than before the conflict, before sliding below $100.

Energy price surges hit households quickly. Higher petrol prices raise transport costs and push up everyday prices. This is the second major energy price spike in the past five years due to war.

The federal government faces a familiar question: what policy tools should it use to respond to sudden global oil price shocks and rising living costs?

For Australia, the answer is more complex because of its unique position in global energy markets. But right now, there is a strong case for taxing windfall gas profits to help households – as long as we get the policy right.

Australia’s unique position in energy markets

Australia imports most of its crude oil and refined petroleum products. Like many other oil-importing countries, it is exposed to the adverse effects of higher oil prices on transport costs, consumer prices and business costs.

But at the same time, Australia is also one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Gas prices have surged about 50% in Asia and Europe since the start of the conflict, while prices for LNG export contracts typically lag by three to six months.

This means the same global energy shock that raises Australian households’ energy bills also generates very high profits for gas exporters such as Woodside, Chevron, Shell, Inpex and Santos.

However, Australia’s gas industry is largely foreign owned. This means a large share of the additional profits generated by higher energy prices flows overseas, rather than directly benefiting Australian households.

This raises an important policy question: should part of these windfall gains be captured to help households cope with higher energy costs? And how would this compare with cutting fuel taxes?

In our research, we modelled the impact of a global oil supply shock on Australia and compared two fiscal tools:

1. a fuel excise cut, similar to the one implemented in 2022, and

2. a temporary levy on supernormal profits in the energy sector.

Here are our findings.

The high cost of a fuel tax cut

Cutting the fuel excise can make petrol cheaper in the short term and cushion the shock. But it comes at a significant cost to the federal budget.

The federal government halved the fuel excise for six months during the last energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The policy helped reduce petrol prices – but cost the budget about A$5.6 billion in lost revenue, weakening the government’s fiscal position.

And this does not address rising gas prices. Domestic businesses and households compete with overseas buyers for Australian gas, pushing energy bills higher.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said last week the government is unlikely to repeat the fuel excise cut, saying it is “not something we’ve been considering”. Instead, he pointed to other cost-of-living measures and petrol price monitoring.

If fuel tax cuts are off the table, what other policy tools are available?

Why taxing windfall gains may work better

Our modelling suggests a temporary levy on windfall profits in the energy sector may work better.

When global energy prices surge, gas exporters can earn unusually large profits. Economists often call these “windfall gains” or “scarcity rents”. These profits arise not because companies become more productive or innovative, but from global energy price shocks.

Because much of Australia’s gas industry is foreign-owned, a significant share of these gains flows overseas. A temporary levy on windfall profits during energy shocks could capture part of these gains and redirect them to support households facing higher energy costs, without weakening the federal budget.

Global gas prices have also surged as supply from the Middle East was disrupted.

Australian gas mainly sells to Asian markets. LNG exporters benefit both from higher global LNG prices, and from rising oil-linked LNG contract prices.

This strengthens the economic case for a temporary windfall tax when Australian households face rising energy bills and cost-of-living pressures.

Designing a tax that works

Australia’s dual role as both an energy importer and exporter matters for policy design.

In our study, the energy profit levy is temporary and well defined. In practice, firms may worry that a “temporary” tax could become a precedent for repeated new taxes whenever prices rise.

This concern doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t act, but it does mean the design of the policy matters. A poorly designed tax could create uncertainty and discourage investment.

If investors feel the government will only tax the “unexpected” highs without offering support during the “unexpected” lows, they may be less likely to fund future projects. A serious policy proposal would require three features:

• Well-defined triggers: Clear rules for when the tax applies.

• Sunset clauses: A legal “expiry date” so the tax ends when the crisis does.

• A fair tax base: Applying only to windfall profits generated by global price shocks.

A carefully designed temporary levy on windfall energy profits is therefore worth exploring to help protect Australian households from global energy shocks.

Locky Xianglong Liu, Research fellow, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University; James Giesecke, Professor, Centre of Policy Studies and the Impact Project, Victoria University, and Jason Nassios, Deputy Director and Associate Professor, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University

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

Last week, the Iranian soccer team refused to sing the national anthem before their Asian Women’s Cup opener on the Gold Coast.

It was a silent protest in solidarity with thousands killed in deadly crackdowns in Iran.

But some of these athletes could be facing the death penalty should they return home, after being labelled “war traitors” on Iranian state television.

Late on Monday, news broke that five players have been granted asylum in Australia and are now safe with police.

So how did it get to this and what may happen next? And what about the rest of the team?

‘Wartime traitors’

Sport, and soccer in particular, carries enormous political weight in Iran.

Athletes are symbols of the nation’s endurance. Their victories are political capital while their silence is viewed as a threat.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, the players’ refusal to sing the national anthem sparked fury with regime hardliners, days after US-Israel strikes on the country.

Radical conservative television presenter Mohammad Reza Shahbazi, who is considered a mouthpiece for the Iranian government, characterised the women’s team as “wartime traitors” for not singing the anthem, and called for reprisals.

The team subsequently sang and saluted the anthem at their next two matches, but the pressure on them did not abate.

If some members of the team return home, they may be charged for a crime that attracts the death penalty in wartime.

For those who stay in Australia, it’s likely their families’ safety will be threatened.

On Sunday, after Iran’s third and final match of the tournament, supporters protested around the team’s bus leaving the stadium, expressing their fear for the team’s safety.

Supporters surrounding the bus reported noticing at least one player making the hand gesture signalling for help (SOS) from the bus window.

Visas granted

As the situation escalated on Monday, US President Donald Trump implored Australia to give the athletes asylum.

He initially claimed the athletes were being forced to leave Australia, but later posted “he’s on it!” after discussing the issue with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

On Tuesday morning, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke confirmed five Iranian athletes have been granted humanitarian visas to stay in Australia after escaping the squad’s security detail.

Burke said the the Australian government was keeping the door open for other athletes to claim asylum:

Last night, I was able to tell five members of the Iranian women’s soccer team that they are welcome to stay in Australia, that they are safe here, and they should feel at home here. Not everyone on the team will make a decision to take up the opportunity that Australia would offer them. What matters here is that they have the best agency they can over those decisions. So we’re making sure that the opportunity to seek assistance is there.

Two more questions

The dramatic events have sparked two serious questions.

First, what could the football organisations involved – the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), and Football Australia – have done to be more prepared?

All have policies that promote and protect human rights. A human rights assessment is also done as part of the host nation bid process.

FIFA has a human rights framework to which bidding host nations must adhere, focused on protecting players and their entourage from discrimination and other human rights abuses.

This framework is also reflected in the AFC statutes for its members, including Football Australia.

Football Australia, as Asian Cup host, states in its constitution that it:

strive(s) to promote the protection of human rights in accordance with FIFA’s human rights policies and commitments.

Beau Busch, Asia/Oceania president of world soccer’s professional players’ association, FIFPRO, said the refusal to sing the anthem had been anticipated.

Busch said he had written to FIFA, the AFC and the tournament organisers on February 11 to express concern for the players’ welfare and offering to work proactively to protect their human rights, but did not receive a reply.

This lack of preparedness meant the Iranian athletes were forced into a last-minute, life-or-death decision under immense pressure.

A second question revolves around the Iranian team’s security detail, which includes people linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

While in Australia, the players have been extremely restricted both inside their hotel and at press conferences by their minders – unable to speak with friends or move freely.

Australia officially listed the IRGC as a state sponsor of terrorism in November 2025.

The IRGC has a strong influence over the Iranian Football Federation, including through its president, Mehdi Taj, who is one of five vice-presidents of the AFC.

But how were these security personnel allowed into the country?

Julian Leeser, Shadow Minister for Education, said anyone associated with the IRGC should be detained.

Lessons for the future

So what lessons can be learned to reduce the chances of this gut-wrenching situation happening again?

A similar situation may emerge in June at the men’s FIFA Men’s World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, for which Iran has qualified.

The president of Iran’s soccer federation has stated he “does not know” if the team will compete, as the US government has not confirmed who from the security team will receive visas to enter the country. The current visa rules in the US places a full restriction on Iranian nationals entry with exceptions subject to case-by-case waivers.

If they do play, FIFA and the World Cup’s local organising committees must be prepared for similar scenes.

Of course, sports organisations aren’t the United Nations. But if these powerful organisations are more proactive and prepared – with clear safeguards and secure access to support – it should help minimise the drama that has affected, not just the athletes and their coach, but their friends and families abroad.

Catherine Ordway, Visiting Scholar, UNSW Sydney and Leila Khanjaninejad, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney

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

The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) is off to another Middle Eastern war, which is likely a surprise to many given how contentious the country’s involvement in the Iraq war was.

The Albanese government has decided to send a RAAF E-7A Wedgetail surveillance aircraft to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), along with 85 personnel and a supply of air-to-air missiles capable of shooting down drones.

Wedgetail aircraft have been sent on similar operations before, not just to the Middle East but most recently to Europe as part of the NATO mission to help Ukraine.

Australia recently agreed to an economic strategic partnership with the UAE, but this military deployment appears to be part of a defence cooperation agreement that dates back to 2007.

So, does this mean Australia is now entering the war by sending military assets, including personnel, to the region?

Defensive role

The deployment, while doubtless agreeable to the Trump administration, is not intended to be part of the Israeli–US air offensive against Iran.

Rather, the E-7A Wedgetail will help the UAE defend itself after some ground-based, long-range air surveillance radar systems were damaged in attacks from Iran. The gap in surveillance coverage will be partly filled by the RAAF aircraft.

The aircraft is fitted with a high-performance air surveillance radar system and will be able to provide early warning of approaching air attacks, most likely from Iran’s Shahed drones.

The aircraft will do this by providing digital tracking data of incoming hostile aircraft and drones to the UAE’s surface-to-air missile systems and fighter aircraft, so they can respond.

The UAE has a very sophisticated air defence system that so far has intercepted over 1,000 Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones.

This extraordinarily large number of interceptions means its large stockpile of interceptor missiles is gradually being depleted. As a result, Australia is also transferring some of its AIM-120 advanced medium-range, air-to-air missiles (AMRAAM) to the UAE to help it intercept drones.

Australia placed a replenishment order to the United States for more of these missiles last year. The missiles now going to the UAE are probably older versions that have been in Australia’s stock for many years.

South Korea is rushing Cheongung-II interceptors to the UAE to help it defend against ballistic missiles, as well.

A history of air support in the region

The E-7A Wedgetail aircraft will presumably be deployed to the Al Minad airbase, some 40 kilometres south of Dubai. The Australian Defence Force has operated there since 2003. It maintains a small permanent presence at the base to support ADF operations across the Middle East.

Last week, the Albanese government announced it was deploying a C-17 large transport aircraft and a KC-30A air-to-air refuelling aircraft to the region. These planes are now assumed to be at Al Minad, too.

The RAAF previously deployed E-7A Wedgetail aircraft to the region from 2014–20 to support the US-led military operations against Islamic State in Iraq. The RAAF personnel going there now, therefore, will be quite experienced in operations in the region and the dangers involved.

The Al Minad airbase has already been hit by Iranian missiles and drones, but these had little effect.

Nevertheless, there is still a risk the E-7A Wedgetail could be damaged while parked at the air base.

Possible issues that could arise

This deployment does not mean Australia is entering a combat role in the war. It will instead have an enabling role – bolstering the UAE’s air defence.

Even though the E-7A Wedgetail has a clearly defensive purpose, the deployment could still be seen from the Iranian perspective as support for the US-Israeli air offensive.

In an indirect way, it could help the US. The RAAF deployment will reduce the need for the US to help defend the UAE, potentially freeing up US forces to strengthen its attacks on Iran. The Australian government’s messaging appears aimed at trying to avoid people drawing this conclusion.

More worryingly, Australia could potentially become enmeshed in other operations now that it has assets there.

For example, Iran has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic, disrupting the flow of oil and gas to the world.

If the US Navy takes military action to forcibly open the strait, it is possible Australia could be called on to support this, initially using the E-7A Wedgetail already in place.

French President Emmanuel Macron has said his country and its European allies are preparing a “purely defensive” mission to escort ships through the strait once the “most intense phase” of the war ends.

Australia could be asked to join this effort, as well, putting its aircraft at risk of attack from Iran. Given Australia’s oil supplies and fuel costs are greatly impacted by the closure of the strait, the government would find it difficult to say no.

The deployment of the E-7A Wedgetail may then be an early warning that Australian military involvement in the Middle East is about to escalate as it did with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and against Islamic State.

Like the Persian Gulf nations, Australia could become trapped and dependent on decisions that will be “mutually” taken by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Peter Layton, Visiting Fellow, Strategic Studies, Griffith University

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

The Australian Grand Prix launches the 2026 Formula 1 (F1) season at Melbourne’s Albert Park on Sunday.

While the US strikes on Iran forced many teams to change their travel plans, organisers are confident the event will go ahead without a hitch.

There is plenty to look out for as the F1 world turns its attention towards Melbourne: the season-opening race is the first of a new era, with changes to technical regulations, while Australian Oscar Piastri is ready to challenge for the drivers’ championship as the crowd watches to see if he can break a lengthy drought on home soil.

Key changes to technical regulations

While the cars will look similar to last season’s, they will be vastly different.

The core aim of the new regulations is to make racing more competitive and increase passing.

Compared with 2025, this year’s cars are smaller, more agile and use more electric power.

The Drag Reduction System (DRS) – an adjustable rear wing device to promote overtaking – has been phased out after being introduced in 2011.

Active aero is now part of the regulations – not just a grey area that teams have tried to exploit.

Active aero allows drivers to change the position of the front and rear wing to produce high drag for cornering (increasing downforce, grip and braking performance), or low drag to deliver more speed on straights.

The biggest regulation changes apply to the power units. The cars will keep their 1.6 litre, turbocharged V6 engines, but the hybrid system will be rebalanced, resulting in a roughly equal split between combustion and electric power.

With almost three times greater electrical power (an increase from 120 kilowatts to 350kW) available, drivers will need to manage the battery charge and deployment.

The cars are smaller and lighter than last season, with the wheelbase reduced by 200 millimetres (to a maximum of 3,400mm), total width reduced by 100mm (1,900mm max), and minimum vehicle weight by 30 kilograms, down to 768kg.

These changes are designed to increase agility and encourage more overtaking opportunities.

Why F1 made these changes

Technical resets are part of the competitive lifecycle in F1.

F1 teams build and unveil a new car every season because technical regulations are updated, and because the pace of development means last year’s design is unlikely to be fast enough to be competitive.

Major technical regulation resets happen every few years and 2026 is one of those bigger shifts.

Changes to technical regulations can improve racing, increase opportunities for previously struggling teams, and ensure innovation stays at the forefront.

Each revision challenges engineers to interpret the regulations with limited data, enabling early innovators to gain a competitive advantage.

This unpredictability can reinvigorate fans’ appeal as new contenders emerge.

The 2026 changes are also aimed at supporting sustainability ambitions.

F1 has committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the use of sustainable fuels reflects this. These commitments could help inform the development of new technologies that find their way into road cars, too.

What will the racing look like?

The lighter, smaller cars may produce more dynamic racing, particularly on narrower street circuits where the smaller cars are more manoeuvrable.

The introduction of active aero should also add a tactical layer, as drivers adjust their wing settings to balance cornering grip and straight line speed.

The increased electrical output of the power units though have raised concerns from some, including four-time world champion Max Verstappen, that F1 racing might resemble Formula E.

Formula E cars run exclusively on battery electrical systems, making energy management central to race strategy: drivers must balance speed with battery conservation, often lifting off the throttle early to regenerate energy through braking.

With battery management, electrical regeneration and deployment all becoming more strategic than before, we will have to wait and see.

Piastri’s weight of expectation

After coming agonisingly close to winning the World Drivers’ Championship last season, the hopes of a nation hang with Piastri.

Australia has produced F1 world champions (Jack Brabham and Alan Jones) but has never produced a winner of the Australian Grand Prix.

Since its move from Adelaide (1985–95) to Albert Park in 1996, the Australian race has opened the F1 season on 23 occasions, meaning it has been the debut race for many drivers.

While many drivers have been successful in their home races – including German Michael Schumacher (four victories at Hockenheim), UK driver Lewis Hamilton (eight wins at Silverstone) and Verstappen from the Netherlands (three victories at Zandvoort) – none of these have coincided with the first race of a season and the implementation of new technical regulations.

Piastri will have to manage the weight of expectation combined with the demands of driving a new car under new regulations, adding a substantial psychological load in his pursuit of a home race win.

His calm and analytical approach to racing should position him well to find early performance in the new car.

But it’s not just about the driver – team performance and competitors’ adaptation will all play a role in whether Piastri is crowned champion at the end of the season.

The stage is set

So, the stage is set in Melbourne for the next chapter of F1, with Piastri Australia’s best title chance in recent times.

Changes to technical regulations rarely produce a predictable outcome. Drivers and teams go through periods of learning and experimenting to find performance.

The Australian Grand Prix is more than the start of a new season. It is the beginning of a new competitive landscape, where local fans will wait with bated breath to see whether Piastri can finally break the Australian GP hoodoo.

Dan van den Hoek, Senior Lecturer, Clinical Exercise Physiology, University of the Sunshine Coast; Anthony Bedford, Associate Professor of Data Science and Senior Performance Analyst, University of the Sunshine Coast, and Bridgette O'Malley, Associate Lecturer (Sport and Exercise Science), University of the Sunshine Coast

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

In 1981, a jingle played out across Australia, encouraging us to “Slip, Slop, Slap!”

In 2023, the jingle was added to the National Film & Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry in recognition of the way the tune – and its message – helped shape Australia.

But Slip, Slop, Slap! wasn’t the start of Australian skin cancer messaging. For that, we need to travel back to the 1930s.

What does going back in time tell us about our relationship to the sun? And how can history inform efforts to address the skin cancer conundrum?

Understanding the sun’s dangers

Although Indigenous Australians can suffer from skin cancers, their ancestors learned to live with the sun’s extremes, seeking shade in the hottest hours. When white woman Eliza Fraser was shipwrecked in 1836, local people treated her sunburn with sand, charcoal and grease.

Medical and popular understandings of skin cancer advanced slowly. In 1895, some thought cancer was contagious. Sydney’s Liverpool council debated whether sufferers should be confined to asylums or allowed freedom of the town.

In 1912, pioneering Melbourne dermatologist Herman Lawrence attributed skin cancer to constant exposure to the sun’s rays under Australia’s particular climatic conditions.

Sydney practitioner Norman Paul’s The Influence of Sunlight in the Production of Cancer of the Skin (1918) and the later Cutaneous Neoplasms (1933) were internationally renowned medical textbooks, furthering the medical argument for better sun protection.

From the 1920s, suntan (sometimes called “sunburn”) switched from a marker of working-class status to a social fad. Beauty parlour sunlamps along with the cosmetics industry played an increasing role as commercial determinants of health by promoting darker skin tones.

Sharing the news

Sporadic anti-tanning messaging in the press became more focused in the 1930s with encouragement from annual Commonwealth Department of Health cancer conferences.

New state-based anti-cancer organisations soon touted warnings to general practitioners, education departments and the general public, via pamphlets, bookmarks, fundraisers and health bulletins.

In the Medical Journal of Australia in 1932, Dr E.H. Molesworth encouraged wearing hats outdoors, confirming that ultraviolet rays in sunlight were a key cause of skin cancer. This message, moreover, was being shared far beyond the medical research community.

In 1930, the Queensland Cancer Trust issued an educational circular on skin cancer directed at hospitals, general practitioners, pharmacists and the broader public.

“The means of preventing Sun Cancer are simple,” it advised:

persons who are exposed to open sunlight should wear wide brimmed hats to protect the face, and should completely cover the rest of the skin.

Similar advice was disseminated during New South Wales Health Week in 1931, and the tendency for Australians to go outside in summer without a hat – dubbed the “no-hat habit” – came under scrutiny in newspapers from Perth to Rockhampton.

In the 1950s, “any change in a wart or a mole” became one of the seven danger signals of cancer, a headline feature in public health campaigns throughout Australia.

Subsequent decades saw skin cancer targeted with a succession of catchy phrases from “Don’t U.V.O.D.”, “Don’t turn your back on a mole” and “Kids cook quick” to “Save your own skin” and “Fry now pay later”.

But tanning continued to be a big part of Australian culture. Behavioural changes around sun protection were counteracted by longstanding messaging about sunlight and health and the postwar boom in beach culture and skimpier swimwear.

Moving forward

Public health campaigns improved skin cancer awareness but could lead to unintended outcomes. Australians turned to artificial means for their golden glow under the mistaken impression this was healthier than the sun’s rays.

In the 1970s, European tanning machines were introduced to Australians. Their importation may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle, but this is a good example of the complicated cultural factors behind behavioural change that belie the simple “bronzed Aussie” stereotype.

City solariums were part of the kit of a new generation of lifestyle centres that fostered clubbish exclusivity. Solarium tans became a marker of social competence and cosmopolitan aspiration, and Australians were slow to heed growing medical concern and cancer council warnings as to their harm.

In 2007, Clare Oliver spoke publicly about the dangers of solariums before her death from melanoma aged 26. Such a moving public example reinforced decades of warnings and gave momentum to stricter industry regulation and the eventual ban on commercial solariums by the mid 2010s.

The Commonwealth Department of Health began rating sunscreen effectiveness in the 1970s. Later studies, however, concluded that increased use could also lead sunbathers to “sunscreen abuse” by spending more rather than less time outdoors.

Slip, Slop, Slap! in 1981 and SunSmart, a skin cancer prevention program launched in 1988 to encourage sunscreen and wearing hats in schools, gained traction because they drew on good science. They were also able to repeat – but more importantly to translate – old messages for new generations.

The facts remain. Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. Two in three Australians will develop some form of skin cancer in their lifetime. Nearly 2,000 Australians die from skin cancer annually. Nearly one in four teens falsely believe a tan protects them against skin cancer.

Skin cancer messaging, now a century old, remains vitally important. Its task is never completed and its challenges are always changing. It will work most effectively when trust in science goes hand-in-hand with historical insight.

Andrew J. May, Professor of History, The University of Melbourne

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

Our beliefs aren’t fixed. They’re shaped, stretched and sometimes overturned by the ideas we encounter as we move through life. For many of us, novels are the moments where that shift happens.

For World Book Day, we asked ten academic experts to share a work of fiction that has challenged their assumptions and changed their thinking in a lasting way.

1. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (1968)

A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines showed me that my potential could not be defined by anyone but myself. The novel made me realise how easily labels from teachers and colleagues can become self-fulfilling. If you’re consistently told that you’re bad at something, you often end up believing it; like the main character Billy, and like myself, when my A-Level biology teacher told me I wouldn’t amount to anything in science and that I should quit.

Hines shows that potential isn’t determined by the people who underestimate you. Learning thrives when it is fuelled by passion and determination, and Billy’s dedication to training his kestrel Kes mirrored my own dedication to become a scientist.

The novel reminded me that the most meaningful growth happens when you trust your abilities more than the limitations other people put on you.

Anneliese Hodge is a PhD researcher in biological sciences

2. Beautiful World Where Are You? by Sally Rooney (2021)

Beautiful World Where Are You? follows the lives and loves of two friends for a period in their late 20s. It is the novel that changed my mind in relation to writing about sexual consent, at least, writing explicitly and positively about it.

I thought that consent was a subject rarely tackled by writers, unless to violate it or teach teenagers. In the latter case, it was usually done in a responsible style – not something stylish or sexy. Choosing a formative diet of 19th-century novels from the western canon undoubtedly biased my perceptions. Beautiful World shattered them. Its graphic sex scenes are peppered with the language of consent. Alright? OK? Can I? Do you want? Yes.

Rooney normalises seeking and giving clear, continuous consent, regardless of gender. Consent is integral to these scenes and part of the pleasure for characters and – if her bestseller status is any indication – readers.

Sarah Olive is a senior lecturer in English literature

3. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2004)

I grew up Roman Catholic in an all-boys school, and I first read Purple Hibiscus as a teenager, when faith was not a question but a climate of incense, rosaries and the quiet mathematics of guilt.

The novel follows Kambili, a Nigerian teenager navigating family, politics and belief under a father whose strict Catholicism masks violence and silence. One scene, in which he pours boiling water over her feet while praying for her soul, captures that terrible fusion of devotion and control.

Across the novel, Adichie unsettled me. I had assumed to question the church was to wound God. She showed me that devotion and questioning can live in the same breath, and that faith is deepened by honest attention rather than unexamined obedience.

This insight continues to shape my thinking about identity, scholarship and everyday moral life, including on African diaspora faith and international development.

Edward Ademolu is a lecturer in cultural competency

4. The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008)

The Years by Annie Ernaux changed my mind on how a life can be narrated.

Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute had already pushed the boundaries of autobiography in 1983 by splitting the narrating self and exposing the inconsistencies of memory. Ernaux masterfully continued along that path, showing how the images and memories that shape us are at once both personal and collective.

The book’s protagonist is approached through descriptions of photographs taken over the years by family members and others. These passages are interwoven with images, events and stories cutting across generations.

What emerges is a fragmented, patchwork portrait that is able to provoke the strongest emotions – immensely more than in a narration where the illusion of the singularity of a life is maintained. And this is probably because of its strange realism, allowing proximity through impersonality. Reading it, I encountered a life as an open space, a theatre of memory where I could wander, moving in and out, getting closer or just passing by.

Cecilia Benaglia is associate professor of French and comparative literature

5. Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future opened my eyes. Not only to the future reality of climate change, but it also made it clear to me that my naive belief that we could engineer our way out of the problem was very far from the truth.

I’d never read a more visceral description of what living and dying in a world ravaged by climate change would feel like. When the temperature climbs and we hit 100% humidity it’s simply impossible for the human body to cool itself, leaving the power grid straining to keep up with demand as those who can afford it attempt to stay alive with air conditioning.

Nothing short of a fundamental shift in what we value and how we act as a collective can get us close to avoiding the worst consequences of the climate crisis, and whichever way we choose the world will change beyond recognition. We just have to pick which path to follow.

Richard Sulley is a senior research fellow in sustainability policy

6. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

In Never Let Me Go, humans are farmed so their organs can be harvested by benefactors whenever needed. The book raises numerous moral questions but the core question for me is – how far will we go to meet a human need?

History suggests that we will damage our natural environment and destroy human lives, societies and even civilisations, to meet some human needs. We face this question now regarding technology such as AI and genetic engineering. They meet human needs of quick data processing or improved health outcomes, but present untold negative risks. Our activities around fossil fuels and minerals raise similar concerns.

This core question, raised by my reading of the novel, has shaped my career. It led me to leave a career in business to retrain as a philosopher so that I could combine business theory with philosophy. I now explore ways of continuing to innovate, but do so more awake to the potential harms and perhaps to make trade-offs that favour human dignity rather than economic progress alone.

Athol Williams is a senior fellow in strategy, leadership & ethics

7. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye had a deep impact on me. It changed how I understand racism. The novel shows that racism is not just built into institutions and systems. It also shapes how people see themselves and the world around them. In the book, whiteness is treated as the standard for everything – beauty, goodness, success, and even what it means to be fully human.

The novel details how Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl growing up in post-Great Depression Ohio, internalises anti-Black racism and develops a crippling inferiority complex through her desperate yearning to have blue eyes. The psychopathological effects of internalising anti-Black racism lead to Breedlove’s eventual insanity, which in a way constitutes her only protection from the misogynoir world.

What is further instructive about Morrison’s work is that it shows what literature, rather than highly technical theory, can do – connects us at a deeply emotional level, helping forge cultures of empathy and care.

Paul Giladi is a reader in philosophy

8. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)

Middlemarch calls itself a “study in provincial life”. It traces a picture of how – even in the 19th century – shifts in religion and science created complicated webs of human relationships.

I read the novel when I was 16, an age at which few people’s ideals are taken particularly seriously. Nevertheless, its central character, Dorothea, gave me a hugely formative model of an unapologetically clever, ardent woman shut out from formal education and struggling to find a meaningful channel for the intensity of her faith. Dorothea keeps searching for meaning, no matter how often she stumbles.

Middlemarch changed my mind by teaching me a kind of consolatory optimism: that whether we place our faith in religion or science, both can set us out “with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way”. To persist, we need “patience with each other and the world”.

Miranda Jane Mourby is a PhD candidate in law

9. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1966)

Back when I was 17, youthfully arrogant and thinking intelligence to be the only virtue worthy of measure, an unassuming sci-fi novel found me.

Flowers for Algernon is told through progress reports penned by the main character, Charlie. Charlie is born with a very low IQ, and is chosen to become the first human subject for an experimental treatment that enhances his IQ over time, eventually making him a genius. The treatment is not successful long term – and so what goes up must also come down.

Transhumanism is the philosophical movement in favour of transforming the human condition through technology, including enhancing cognitive abilities. Flowers for Algernon changed my naïve acceptance of the transhumanist core premises, as the novel forces you to ask instead: What makes intelligence good? Who is this enhancement for, and who does it benefit? How do we define what makes humans “better”?

In these days of tech billionaires investing in gene-editing and hailing the coming of artificial general intelligence, words from this novel still echo in my head: “Intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen is a fellow in AI and In/equality

10. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016)

Whenever I’m asked if I “live to work” or “work to live”, I think of the adage: “I do not dream of labour.” My position has been troubled once, namely by Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.

Murata’s novel follows Keiko, a convenience store worker who is socially shamed to leave her job and find a husband. Despite establishing a fake relationship with her workshy former colleague Shiraha, she still earns scorn from their respective families. Keiko ultimately leaves, determined to work at a convenience store again.

Initially, I was tempted to read this as a sad ending. Considering the novel’s critique of how society forces people into specific “norms” against their better judgement, I suddenly paused; was I missing the point?

This is not to say that the novel presents Keiko’s return to low-wage work as a fully positive thing. There is a gothic quality to Keiko’s view that she is a mere appendage of the store’s ecosystem. However, the ending made me consider: as a reader, was I adding to socially prescribed assumptions of what a “happy” ending might look like?

Lillian Hingley is a researcher and tutor in English

Has a novel ever changed your mind? Let us know in the comments below.

Anneliese Hodge, PhD Candidate, Ecotoxicology, Plymouth Marine Laboratory; Athol Williams, Lecturer in Management, University of Oxford; Cecilia Benaglia, Associate Professor, School of Modern Languages & Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick; Edward Ademolu, Lecturer in Cultural Competency, King's College London; Lillian Hingley, Postdoctoral Researcher in English Literature, University of Oxford; Miranda Jane Mourby, PhD Candidate, Law, University of Sheffield; Paul Giladi, Reader in Philosophy in the School of History, Religions and Philosophies, SOAS, University of London; Richard Sulley, Senior Research Fellow, Sustainability Policy, University of Sheffield; Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen, Academic Fellow in AI and In/equality, University of Sheffield, and Sarah Olive, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Aston University

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

Thomas Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was ahead of its time in more ways than one. Upon its publication, it provoked controversy with its explicit criticism of organised religion and traditional marriage, leading to book burnings and public criticism.

Hardy attributed the public criticism to his retirement from novel writing. He had already courted controversy in the literary establishment a few years earlier by describing the unmarried mother who (spoiler alert) goes on to commit murder at the centre of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) as “a pure woman”. But Jude the Obscure was his most searing attack yet on the hypocrisies of late Victorian society.

The novel’s apparent endorsement of free love, and damning portrait of conventional marriage, alienated many readers including – perhaps unsurprisingly – Hardy’s wife, with whom the novel caused an irreparable breach.

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

There’s no getting away from it, the story is something of a downer. It’s the tale of a young man – the “obscure” Jude – whose life starts off hard and gets harder as he faces a string of obstacles in the pursuit of his dreams. And he is a dreamer.

The novel opens with a young Jude being introduced to the idea of a university education, as his beloved schoolteacher leaves him for the dreaming spires of Oxford (called Christminster in the novel). Gazing at the “mirage” of the cityscape on the horizon and captivated by the idea of this “beautiful city”, Jude is immediately cautioned by his guardian that it “is a place much too good for you”.

As the somewhat bleak title suggests, this is a story about alienation and social exclusion. Unperturbed by the ominous warnings, the working class Jude seeks to prepare himself for a university education by self-educating, using borrowed textbooks to teach himself Ancient Greek and Latin and studying diligently for many years.

As a young man, working as a stonemason in Christminster, Jude is determined to prove that universities are not, as he is told, “only for them with plenty o’ money”. He writes to the university, seeking advice on how to further his ambition of studying with them. The answer, when it comes, is crushing. Jude is advised that “as a working-man … [he] will have a better chance of success in life by remaining in [his] own sphere and sticking to [his] trade”.

In one of the most visceral images in the book, Jude responds by scrawling on the outside walls of the university: “I have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you.”

Sadly, this act of protest is still resonant today. As Jude understands, education is a path to social mobility. His impassioned defence of his own worth, as a scholar and as a human being, highlights the barriers faced by economically disadvantaged young people.

Inequality persists

In today’s society, it is unlikely that any hopeful student would receive such overt “stay in your lane” advice. Contemporary higher education aspires to a culture of widening participation, in which students from traditionally underrepresented groups are encouraged through outreach initiatives, contextual offers (in which applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds are given slightly lower grade requirements) and scholarships to apply to university.

Well-publicised schemes such as the Stormzy Scholarships, which seek to make University of Cambridge degrees more affordable for black students, have the explicit aim of redressing historical inequalities to make the university admissions process a more equitable system.

However, inequalities persist. Students from the poorest backgrounds are still drastically underrepresented at the UK’s most elite universities. Admissions statistics show that at Oxford, the object of Jude’s ambitions, applicants from fee-paying schools are more likely to be accepted than those from state schools.

Factor in, too, the increasingly eye-watering costs of living for students and, despite years of effort, the danger is that a university education remains the preserve of “them with plenty o’ money”.

As Hardy shows in the novel, the consequences can be devastating. While on a population level it results in stagnating social mobility, on a personal level the frustrations associated with the failure to fulfil your potential are profound, and the practical implications of being forced to remain in a position of economic dependence are severe.

Jude’s persistent reliance on the goodwill of others, and his struggles to provide for his growing family, all stem from his exclusion from the opportunity to raise his social position.

As his desperate scrawls on the walls of the university argue, access to higher education should be for those with merit, not money. Some 130 years on from the publication of Hardy’s novel, it seems work still needs to be done, lest we risk future generations falling into obscurity.

Beyond the Canon

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

Like Jude the Obscure, Willy Russell’s Educating Rita (1980) is about education and the class system. In one scene, Rita, a working class Open University student from the north of England, has her books burned by her husband after he discovers she’s secretly been using contraception.

Watching Rita look on helplessly as her books and notes gradually succumb to the flames, as dramatised in the 1983 film, I vividly remember being moved to tears. I understood that Rita’s husband wasn’t just hindering her learning, he was telling her he didn’t want her to become an educated person, as he feared what education would give her.

At the heart of the play is a message that is too often lost in the current obsession with quantifiable measures of success and employability. That is, for some people, education is not merely a means to a qualification or a higher paying job. Education can be the end in itself.

Describing the book burning, Rita reflects on her husband’s failure to understand her studies, stating that her education is a chance to “breathe” and find herself. The value of this for anyone, although not easily measurable, can be profound.

While Jude’s barriers prove insurmountable, Rita’s is a more hopeful story. It stands as an impassioned argument for the significance and power of lifelong learning, and like Hardy’s novel before it, for the importance of accessible education.

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Shelley Galpin, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King's College London

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

During the winter months, when days are short and cold and nights are long and dark, creating a warm and cosy indoor atmosphere can feel especially important.

Where I live in Denmark, around 75% of the population burns candles two or more times a week, and 34% use them daily during the winter months.

In fact, Denmark is often said to be the country with the highest per-capita candle consumption in Europe. Danes burn around 5.8kg of candle wax per person per year – the equivalent of about six bags of sugar.

Yet, nice as they can look, studies show burning candles is one of the biggest sources of indoor air pollution. This is because when burning, candles emit a large number of ultrafine particles.

These particles are so small that they are invisible to the human eye, and more than a thousand times thinner than a human hair. They can remain airborne for long periods, and when candles are blown out, the concentration of these particles (including soot) increases even further.

Candles vs cooking

In our experiments conducted in exposure chambers (where the climate is controlled) at Aarhus University, we examined how indoor air is affected both by burning candles and cooking pork in an oven.

Cooking – and especially frying – is known to emit high concentrations of particles due to combustion (the process of burning something). Particles from combustion processes are among the most harmful to human health – but less is known about the role that particles emitted from candles plays when it comes to indoor air pollution.

Our research found that while both candles and cooking emit high levels of particles, the number of particles from candles was much higher. Even more significant was the difference in particle size: cooking produced particles about 80 nanometers wide, whereas candles generated particles around seven-to=eight nanometers in size – much smaller and much easier for our lungs to inhale.

We also measured chemical compounds in the air, and found that burning candles produced not only soot particles but gases such as nitrogen dioxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) – a group of chemicals associated with inflammation and even cancer.

The particles we breathe

Ultrafine particles are of particular concern from a health perspective. They are easily inhaled into our lungs, but research has found they are excreted from the body very slowly.

Due to their extremely small size, particles from candles can penetrate deep into our smallest airways, known as the alveoli, and may even enter the bloodstream. From there, they can reach organs such as the heart and brain.

Indeed, the particles formed when candles are burning are remarkably similar to those found in diesel exhausts in size and composition. These particles have been linked to increased mortality rates from lung and cardiovascular diseases.

In our study, we also investigated how candle burning affects young adults with mild asthma. We found subtle but measurable biological changes following exposure to candle emissions.

Some markers of airway and blood inflammation were altered, and participants reported irritation and discomfort. Other studies among healthy adults have observed small decreases in lung function, changes in arterial stiffness and heart rate, and reduced cognitive function after exposure to burning candles.

Light and dark

You might be thinking: all this from just a candle? But it’s worth remembering that people with chronic conditions like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are far more sensitive to particulate air pollution.

Because people with these conditions already have chronically inflamed airways, even relatively low levels of pollution — including particles released by burning candles — can be enough to trigger symptoms.

Children, older adults and people with chronic illnesses are also particularly vulnerable to air pollution, due to immaturity of their lungs or weakened immune systems.

Indeed, for anyone with asthma or other respiratory conditions, the quality of indoor air is not a minor detail, but a key factor in day-to-day symptom control and long-term respiratory health.

Blow out all the candles?

But that’s not to say those without lung disease or asthma aren’t affected. As research shows, burning candles affects not only the indoor environment but potentially everyone’s health. Fortunately, a few simple steps can help maintain a healthier indoor climate.

Try using LED candles, for example, or light only a few candles at once. You should also place candles away from drafts to avoid a flickering flame, which can produce more soot and smoke. Trim your candles’ wicks to reduce soot formation, too. And candles should never be burned near (or by) people with respiratory disease.

Most importantly, air out the room afterwards by opening your windows. Such measures can help reduce the number of particles significantly, and make all the difference when it comes to keeping your cosy or hygge-time healthy.

Karin Rosenkilde Laursen, Postdoctoral fellow in Public Health, Aarhus University

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

Roughly 425 million years ago, in the warm seas over what is now southern China, there lived a metre-long bony fish with jaws full of clusters of spiky teeth.

Long extinct, this predatory fish (Megamastax amblyodus) was an ancient forerunner of all animals with a skeleton and a backbone alive today – including you and me – and was the world’s oldest known vertebrate apex predator that lived at the top of the food chain in its environment.

In a new paper published in Nature today, we report the discovery of a remarkable new fossil of this strange creature.

This fossil gives us an unprecedented view into the early evolution of bony fishes, and fills a key gap in our understanding of the evolution of vertebrate diversity seen on Earth today.

The dawn of bony fishes

Bony fish are known as osteichthyans. They make up around 98% of all vertebrate species on Earth.

By the end of the Silurian Period (419.2 million years ago) the osteichthyans had branched into two main lineages: the Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes) and Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fishes and limbed tetrapods, including humans).

Until recently, our knowledge of the very earliest bony fishes (stem-osteichthyans) that branched off before that great split was restricted to tantalising fragments from Silurian and Early Devonian rocks, giving only the briefest glimpse into their bizarre anatomy.

Megamastax: the early discoveries

We first described Megamastax in 2014 based on isolated jaw bones from the Kuanti Formation of Yunnan in southern China.

The largest jaw would have been 17 centimetres long when complete, suggesting an animal roughly one metre long that was – and still is – the largest known jawed fish from the Silurian period. While there were sharp, conventional teeth on the biting margins of the mouth, the inner surface of the lower jaw displayed a row of big semicircular “lumps” unlike anything seen before.

We identified these as an inner row of large blunt teeth, presumably for crushing armoured prey, and so named the new fossil Megamastax amblyodus – the “big mouth with blunt teeth”.

‘Big mouth’ gets a makeover

We hoped to find more fossils of this fish in subsequent field trips to Yunnan. But nothing prepared us for what turned up just few years later: a complete skull and jaws that revealed a creature far weirder than we could have ever imagined.

The skull was long and narrow, with small eyes and a huge mouth with a sharply hooked snout. The anatomy was an odd mosaic of features associated with many different vertebrate groups.

On the one hand, the cheeks and gill covers were typical for an early bony fish. But other features were strikingly similar to the strange Silurian fish [Entelognathus], which was a type of “placoderm” (a group of extinct armoured fish) that lived at the same time. One such feature was the configuration of the bones on the skull roof which are singular instead of paired.

In most bony fishes, the paired bones at the front of the mouth are simple structures that sit flat against the front of the snout. But in Megamastax and Entelognathus, these bones also had broad horizontal shelves that extended into the roof of the mouth.

High-resolution scans revealed internal features which were unusual for a bony fish. The way the braincase extended far backwards was once again similar to Entelognathus, while the major arteries branched at the back of the skull in a manner identical to early shark relatives.

A mouth full of pincushions

Inside the mouth, we learned the truth of those strange lumps on the original lower jaw.

The new skull showed complementary rows of lumps on the roof of the mouth. Also present were odd little circular structures that, in life, would have slotted onto these lumps, each topped with a cluster of sharp fangs.

So those mysterious lumps were not teeth at all, but the mounting points for bony tooth cushions.

Tiny isolated tooth cushions had previously been found with Lophosteus and Andreolepis, two fragmentary bony fish from the Silurian period in Europe. These were originally interpreted as being associated with the gills, but it was also suspected they may have instead been a kind of tooth plate. But how they fit into the mouth was a mystery.

Megamastax finally answers this and reveals these cushions were widely distributed at the base of the bony fish radiation, but were lost in the common ancestor of the ray-fins and lobe-fins.

So instead of having a few blunt teeth for cracking armour, Megamastax instead had a mouth filled with clusters of piercing fangs for snagging softer-bodied prey. However, it was a vastly larger fish than any other animal in its habitat and could likely devour most of them regardless of armour.

It was likely the earliest vertebrate apex predator in the fossil record.

A complementary find

The new skull of Megamastax is one of two new major Chinese fossil discoveries.

The other is Eosteus chongqingensis (by a different team of authors), a tiny 3cm long bony fish from the famous 435 million year old Huixingshao Formation, Chongqing.

This find complements the outstanding cranial detail of Megamastax in preserving the whole body and fins. At over 10 million years older than Megamastax, this is the earliest osteichthyan in the fossil record.

The great-uncle of all living bony vertebrates

With only jaws, it was hard to pinpoint where Megamastax sat within the osteichthyan family tree.

We previously suggested it could be a primitive lobe-finned fish. But the new skull revealed it to be something else. Our new family tree moves it closer to the great split, but above all the other stem-osteichthyans in the analysis.

If correct, then Megamastax is the closest known form to the common ancestor of the ray-finned and lobe-finned fishes.

This new skull bridges the gap between placoderms and bony fishes. In revealing the anatomical “default settings”, Megamastax provides a template for exploring when and how the osteichthyans acquired key features – a journey that would ultimately lead to their incredible modern diversity.

Brian Choo, Postdoctoral Fellow in Vertebrate Palaeontology, Flinders University and Jing Lu, PhD Candidate, Evolutionary Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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

University can be a time of great opportunities, but it can also be very stressful. Many students need to support themselves financially and may be living away from home. Students are also under constant deadlines and, if in their final years, need to prepare for life and work after uni.

My colleagues and I research how students can succeed and thrive in their studies.

So, as classes begin for semester one, how can you be proactive about your wellbeing and find a healthy balance between work, study and friends?

Academic and personal wellbeing

There are two interconnected parts of life that are particularly challenged at university. These are academic wellbeing and personal wellbeing.

Academic wellbeing is about your learning and achievement, and how motivated and engaged you are with your studies. Personal wellbeing is about your mental health, self-esteem, life satisfaction and sense of meaning and purpose.

This is where “buoyancy” – sometimes called everyday resilience – comes in. Buoyancy is students’ ability to bounce back from challenges, difficulties and setbacks. It helps them navigate the ups and downs of university life, from competing deadlines, to exam stress and the demands of paid work.

In our research, we have identified psychological and interpersonal ways to help students maintain their academic and personal wellbeing. We call them “the 6 Cs of buoyancy”.

1. Confidence

We have found students who believe in themselves to do what they set out to do tend to respond well to difficulty. Boosting self-belief, or confidence, involves two important things.

• Focus on the positives: recognise what knowledge and skills you already have. Avoid negative thinking traps. For example, give yourself credit for positive results instead of thinking the “lecturer went easy on me”.

• Develop a broader view of success: view success not just in terms of marks, but also in terms of learning new things and personal improvement. This helps you recognise more of the things you do well, so you receive confidence-boosters more often.

2. Control

Our research shows students who feel as though they are “in the driver’s seat” are not as easily affected by adversity. There are two helpful ways you can feel in control.

• Focus on the three things in your control: these are effort (how hard you try), strategy (the way you try) and attitude (what you think of yourself and the challenge).

• Seek out feedback: this is information or ideas about how to navigate a challenge or improve next time. You can get this from teachers, a student advisor or trusted peers.

3. Commitment

Staying focused on your goals can help you persist through tough times. There are two ways to support this.

• Set clear goals and a plan for meeting them: so you know what you’re doing, why, and how to do it.

• Seek support: remember there are people who can help you if you are unsure about something, such as academic staff and student support services.

4. Coordination

Having a clear plan also helps you to navigate your way through challenges. There are two ways to do this:

• Look ahead: what challenges are on the horizon? Are there assignment deadlines on the same day? Be proactive and get onto them early so you finish them by the due date.

• Have a timetable: make a realistic and achievable weekly timetable so you can balance the different things you need and want to do.

5. Composure

Academic anxiety typically involves worrying excessively about poor results, performance in an upcoming test or presentation, meeting deadlines and getting on top of difficult coursework. Managing your academic anxiety is an important part of maintaining academic and personal wellbeing.

• Have stress management and relaxation strategies: find strategies that work for you. This may be meditation, exercise, reading or connecting with nature.

• Make lifestyle adjustments: create healthy habits, such as an improved diet, less alcohol, more sleep or staying off social media channels that “wind you up”.

6. Connection

A sense of belonging is a buffer against stress. Good relationships are also a protective factor in tough times.

• Get more involved: participate in classes, labs and tutorials. Say “yes” to social opportunities such as a coffee after a lecture. Look for a university club or society you can join. Go into uni a little more than being online.

• Keep in touch: socialise with good friends from school or other parts of life outside of uni.

What if I am struggling?

The 6 Cs are helpful for navigating day-to-day challenges at university. But it is important to reach out to a mental health professional on or off campus if you need more support.

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

Andrew J. Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology, UNSW Sydney

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

Whether you whistle or not, you can’t escape whistlers. They’re dog owners, construction workers, day dreamers, concertgoers and annoying sports fans whose shrill makes you wish for earplugs.

And there are tradies – Snow White’s pesky disciples who think whistling while you work makes chores fun. (Disclaimer: It didn’t work for my taxes.)

Admittedly, whistling can be useful for silencing noisy crowds and hailing taxis New York-style, but be mindful of the social rules. You can whistle admiringly at a flashy car, but you’ll be fined up to 750 euros for sexual harassment if you wolf whistle at women publicly in France.

Whistlers in history

Whistling is a common human skill. For centuries, shepherds and goat herders used whistling to summon livestock and direct dogs to steer the herds. The whistling sound can travel ten times further than shouting, which makes it ideal for long distance communication in rural areas.

Long ago, remote communities in Turkey and Mexico developed a whistled version of their spoken languages for communicating across the countryside. As linguist Julien Meyer explains, each syllable of a word translated to a whistled melody, allowing neighbours to talk across vast distances. Whistled languages are still in use today in places like La Gomera in the Canary Islands.

Whistling featured prominently in the development of the recording industry. Historian Tim Brooks recounts how Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention, the phonograph, drew public curiosity but the sound quality of recorded voice was too weak to show off the machine’s potential.

Shrill whistling, however, could be reproduced perfectly, which likely sustained public interest through the phonograph’s early modifications. Brooks traced the transformation of George W. Johnson from a whistling street performer at a ferry terminal to New York recording artist at the birth of the recording industry.

Decades later, whistling continued leaving musical marks in the industry. Notable examples include Roger Whittaker’s intricate The Mexican Whistler, Otis Redding’s layback ending to The Dock of the Bay, Bobby McFerrin’s cheerful Don’t Worry, Be Happy, and Maroon 5’s distinctive opening to Moves Like Jagger.

Today, there’s even a market for complete whistling albums like from Molly Lewis. But few recordings are as memorable as the 1966 Spaghetti Western theme song The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It made whistling iconic for showdowns.

How whistling works

Whistling is produced when small pockets of air spinning at your lips interact with spaces in your mouth. Puckering your lips and whistling with fingers use the same principles.

Musical sound is produced when something, such as a guitar string, vibrates. Vibrations create pressure in the air which moves outwards in waves. When we whistle, the air itself becomes the vibrator. What happens next makes it audible.

Different spaces affect a sound wave’s energy as it passes through. Some cavities dampen the energy, while others excite it by swirling around making the cavern itself vibrate or resonate. That’s what makes whistling louder.

To experience the power of resonance, try singing in a bathroom with lots of towels, then remove the towels and sing again. The extra ring you’ll hear is the effect of resonance.

Whistling works by fine-tuning the speed of your breath with the size, shape and tension in your lips and tongue so the space rings.

Learning to whistle

Unfortunately, knowing the physics doesn’t make whistling easier. Learning requires coordinating your senses with how you move your body. You create a learning loop where your brain connects your mouth and breath movement with what you hear, feel and see when you whistle.

Simply put, you use trial and error to figure which actions help amplify the sound and which don’t.

Whistlers aren’t born. They’re made. If you find whistling hard, then you’ll need to practice isolating and moving all the parts in an epic Gollum-like quest for the precious ring.

Top tips for whistling pucker-style:

• find a quiet room

• wet your whistle – water on your lips helps

• push your lips forward to make a small, firm hole; a mirror can help you see what you’re doing

• breathe out with a steady air stream

• listen to the sound and experiment with your tongue tip position (forward, backwards, higher, lower), lips shape (tightened, relaxed, wider, pushed forward, pulled sideways), and breath stream (faster, slower) – you should hear subtle changes, even if it just sounds like wind

• play around until you find one position where the sound seems louder than others

• make micro adjustments in the position to find which movements increase the ring

• repeat all steps daily so your brain learns to find your whistle automatically and tune it.

Failing that, take up singing. It’s easier and you won’t look like you’re kissing a ghost.

Wendy Hargreaves, Academic in the School of Education and Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland

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

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of people who have died.

Much of the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) and Indigenous peoples focuses on harms, such as cultural appropriation, cultural flattening and digital exclusion. These risks are real.

But behind them sits an assumption that rarely gets challenged: because Aboriginal cultures are ancient, they must be static. Rooted firmly in the past, to stay there. That they cannot adapt to something as disruptive as generative AI.

This misreads tens of thousands of years of history. And it misses something our work with Traditional Owners in the Kimberley in Western Australia has made increasingly clear: Indigenous cultures are not only capable of adapting to AI – the way they have always held and transmitted knowledge may make them natural users of it.

‘Say it properly’

When I (Liz) first began working with Wororra people in the Kimberley, the late Janet Oobagooma taught me Wororra words. A senior cultural Elder for the Dambimangari community, she was exacting. When I got tongue-tied, she would growl at me: “If you’re gonna talk, say it properly”.

That strictness is structural, not personal. Wororra is an oral language. There is no written form to fall back on.

All societal laws, historical records, kinship information and cultural practices accumulated over millennia must be held in living memory – encoded across an entire population in songs, mythology, art, dance and ceremony. Nothing is filed in a single place. Everything is distributed, collectively maintained, and must be practised to survive.

This is fundamentally different from Western text-based, institutionalised knowledge systems.

And it raises a practical question: if oral knowledge was never meant to be read off a page, are libraries and archives really the best way to return it to the communities it belongs to?

Locked away in archives

The renowned Wororra lawman Sam Woolagoodja – co-author Francis Woolagoodja’s grandfather – worked with anthropologists, filmmakers and linguists over decades. Among them were missionary linguist Howard Coate, filmmaker Michael Edols, and bush adventurer Malcolm Douglas, who filmed Sam repainting Wandjina rock art at Raft Point.

Over more than 40 years Sam shared cultural knowledge with these researchers. The recordings, field notes and translations captured during this period contribute some of the most detailed documentation of Wororra culture in existence.

Today, this material sits in institutions across the country, thousands of kilometres from the communities it belongs to.

This isn’t only a matter of preservation. For Aboriginal corporations managing Country, this data informs modern governance. Genealogies determine who speaks for Country. Heritage records shape native title decisions – as traditional owners have said to each other in management forums: “people are making up their own story about us”.

What AI made possible

Working with Sam’s descendants, we set out to gather his legacy of archived cultural material and explore ways to return it to community.

We began using a generative AI tool – Claude, made by Anthropic – to assist in making sense of data provided to Howard Coate by Sam.

We used it for deciphering difficult handwriting in decades-old field notebooks, cross referencing genealogies across multiple sources, and organising hundreds of extracted PDF scans into usable files. Work that normally takes months could be completed in hours.

But the real shift came when we began directing the AI to work only within a defined set of curated sources – published research, verified archival material, community-approved records – rather than drawing from the open internet.

Within that controlled environment, we could ask questions about Wororra culture in plain language and receive grounded answers drawn only from material we trusted.

It became a way of learning through dialogue rather than reading dense academic text. For those of us working to understand a culture’s depth from scattered published sources, it accelerated learning dramatically.

This experience gave us an idea. If a curated AI environment could help researchers engage with cultural knowledge through conversation, could a purpose-built system do the same for community members – especially younger generations living in town, away from Country?

The limitations of AI

General-purpose AI still has serious limitations. It has no understanding of cultural protocols or Indigenous data sovereignty, no concept of restricted knowledge governed by gender, age or ceremonial authority.

It can present errors with complete confidence, mixing up sources, misattributing cultural information, or presenting guesswork as fact. In heritage work, accuracy is not optional.

So we are developing a purpose-built concept. A closed-system AI governed by the community, where sources are verified, culturally appropriate and collectively endorsed.

The intent is not to replace oral tradition but to give communities a way to interact with their heritage through dialogue using AI. That’s closer to how this knowledge was always meant to be used than any library shelf or academic paper.

Janet Oobagooma and the Elders who contributed to the Dambimangari community’s published history, Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee (“we are telling all of you”), always emphasised that culture is not a museum exhibit.

It is alive, it adapts, and it demands to be spoken. AI is just the latest tool that could help make that happen – if communities are the ones holding it.

Elizabeth Vaughan, Rock Art Australia Kimberley Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia and Francis Woolagoodja, Dambimangari Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge

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

The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup is the first major women’s soccer tournament Australia has hosted since the groundbreaking 2023 Women’s World Cup.

The 12-team event, which will be held in Perth, Sydney and the Gold Coast, started on Sunday with the Matildas winning their first match against the Philippines. They next play Iran on Thursday night.

The tournament also doubles as a qualifier for the 2027 Women’s World Cup and represents a chance for the Matildas to win a major tournament on home soil.

While there will no doubt be huge interest in the tournament, particularly if the Matildas continue to do well, it is also an opportunity to look at the challenges facing women’s sport in general and women’s soccer in particular in the lead-up to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

The impact of the 2023 World Cup

The 2023 Women’s World Cup was the largest major women’s sport event Australia has (co-)hosted.

It marked a significant moment in women’s sport in Australia.

It provided a space so welcoming that many self-described sports haters and fans alienated by the hypermasculinity of men’s sports were drawn to it.

It delivered a socially contagious collective experience that was diverse, representative, and feel-good.

It also showed investing in women’s sport is good business.

With more than 1.75 million tickets sold and with television audience figures exceeding even those of the AFL grand final and NRL’s State of Origin, the 2023 tournament set new benchmarks for women’s sport’s visibility and commercialisation.

The Matildas are now one of Australia’s most recognisable and marketable national sports brands. They sell out match after match, outsell Socceroos jerseys 2:1 and have commanded the “Matildas effect” – a byword for perception- and participation-changing influence and gender equality advancement.

The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup, which for the first time features its own mascot and with it accompanying engagement and merchandise opportunities, will want to leverage and extend that inclusiveness, brand and market.

More work needs to be done

While the Matildas specifically and women’s sport internationally – from basketball to ice hockey – have become more popular and more profitable, that hasn’t translated domestically.

The A-League women’s competition suffered a 26% attendance decline in 2024–25 and underinvestment in the league means players are unable to secure full-time, year-round employment.

While outlier top-tier Australian soccer players earn high salaries, 39% of women athletes don’t earn anything from sport.

A 2025 report from Australian soccer’s player development program showed many athletes are struggling with challenges around disordered eating, alcohol and anxiety.

Women coaches also experience more adversity than men.

At a policy and advocacy level, the country’s sole Office for Women in Sport and Recreation has been disbanded by the Victorian government, and Australia still lacks a national strategy for women’s sport.

Bridging the national team-domestic league gap will be front of mind for administrators during and beyond the Women’s Asian Cup to ensure sustainability.

Areas for improvement

There will be no increase to Women’s Asian Cup prize money at the 2026 tournament – it will remain at US$1.8 million (A$2.55 million) shared between the top four teams, the same as 2022.

Compare this with the US$14.8 million ($A21 million) allocated to the men in 2023.

That 88% prize money gap signals much work still needs to be done to facilitate equality.

Media coverage is similarly lagging. While it has increased from the box-ticking “one and done” media coverage of the past, it remains largely event-based.

Social media is plugging the major media gap, raising players’ profiles and providing transformative engagement but it often entails unpaid labour to maintain an online presence.

It also exposes athletes to greater levels of online abuse.

Opportunities on and off the pitch

The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup represents a chance to prove the hype around women’s soccer is more than a one-time thing. Simultaneously, it needs to avoid counterproductive “boom time, again” narratives that emerge about every decade espousing that women’s sport has “made it”.

It also represents an opportunity to take women’s soccer in Australia to the next level.

Despite the Matildas developing a huge fan following and demonstrating much promise, not since the 2010 Asian Cup has the team been able to bring home a trophy.

The 2006 and 2010 Asian Cups (when Australia finished runners-up and champion respectively) showed the Matildas could compete.

The 2023 Women’s World Cup showed the world there was a market.

This year’s Women’s Asian Cup represents a chance to bring the two together as the Matildas seek to realise their potential and ensure sustainability by both filling stadiums and bringing home silverware.

It is a significant opportunity for the team to show it can win both off and on the pitch.

Fiona Crawford, Adjunct Lecturer at the Centre for Justice, Queensland University of Technology

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

On paper, the Matildas should have a major advantage playing on home soil for the upcoming Women’s Asian Cup.

However, from a sleep and travel perspective, they may be fighting a hidden disadvantage despite Australia hosting the tournament, which runs from March 1–21.

This is because most of Australia’s squad is based overseas, many flying from the top European leagues in England, Italy, Germany and Sweden.

Let’s unpack the challenges they face and how travel impacts these athletes.

How flying impacts sleep

The human body runs on an approximate 24-hour internal timing system known as the circadian rhythm.

This body clock regulates when we feel alert, when we feel sleepy and even how well we perform.

Therefore, when a team travels from Southwest or Central Asia to Australia, the players may shift forward up to 6–7 hours.

Let’s take, for example, the Iranian national team, almost all of whom play in the local domestic league. For staff and players travelling from Tehran to Brisbane, their internal body clocks will still think it’s the middle of the night when it’s morning in Brisbane.

The result is jet lag: a misalignment between the internal body clock and the new time zone, which generally resolves at about one day per time zone crossed.

Jet lag results in disrupted sleep, daytime fatigue, slower reaction times and reduced concentration.

In travelling to Australia, nations such as Iran and Uzbekistan will cross five or more time zones, others such as Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea will face only minor shifts.

But the Matildas, Japan and South Korea have many players arriving from various European countries.

The Matildas have the most overseas-based players of any squad (closely followed by Japan). The Australians have 23 players arriving into Perth from all different locations: 13 from England, four from Sweden, two from Italy, two from Germany, one from the United States and one from Canada.

The distance of travel matters. Long-haul flights can disrupt sleep even before jet lag begins.

Athletes often struggle to sleep on planes due to restricted movement, cabin pressure, dehydration and unfamiliar conditions.

They can suffer what is known as travel fatigue, which is different from jet lag.

So some teams will arrive in Australia only sleep-deprived (travel fatigue, minor shifts), and some will arrive both sleep-deprived as well as circadian-misaligned (jet lag).

Direction matters

The severity of symptoms and rate of adaptation largely depend the direction of the flight and the individual variation.

Travel to Australia can take up to 30 hours in the less favourable eastward direction.

To put it simply, recovering from eastward travel usually requires people to shift their sleep and wake up earlier.

Physiologically, this is harder than travelling west because advancing the body clock affects the body more than delaying it.

Why some players adapt faster

Not everyone responds to travel in the same way.

Adaptation to time-zone change is moderated by chronotype – natural preferences of the body for sleep and wake activities.

Morning types (larks) feel alert early and are ready for bed earlier while evening types (owls) prefer later schedules.

These differences are important because morning types may adapt better to eastward travel.

Evening types often struggle more because they must fall asleep earlier than their biological preference. Exposure to bright light at the wrong time (such as scrolling on a phone in a brightly lit hotel room) may further delay adjustment.

That’s why screening players’ natural sleep patterns before a tournament can help staff individualise plans.

Experience counts. Players who regularly compete in international tournaments are repeatedly exposed to long-haul travel and rapid time-zone changes where overtime they often develop different behavioural strategies to help reduce the severity of jet lag symptoms.

Sleep banking and light exposure

One of the simplest and most effective strategies is something called sleep banking.

In the week before departure, players can deliberately extend their nightly sleep by 30–60 minutes. This creates a buffer against the inevitable sleep loss during travel and competition.

Research shows this can minimise performance declines and speed-up recovery later, especially when going into periods of disrupted sleep.

In short, we can’t eliminate jet lag but we can prepare for it.

Once in Australia, timing becomes everything.

The timing of light exposure after eastward travel becomes ever more important. Evening light should be limited.

Short daytime naps (20–60 minutes, ideally early afternoon) can reduce fatigue without impairing night-time sleep.

Caffeine can be helpful but only when timed carefully: a sneaky late-afternoon coffee may impact subsequent sleep and potentially delay adaptation.

Sleep as a competitive advantage

In tournament football, sleep should be viewed as a performance variable that underpins both preparation and recovery.

Athletes’ sleep is commonly disrupted after competition, particularly night games.

In a tournament context, this creates a compounding problem: one poor night can carry into subsequent matches via reduced recovery, impaired mood and vigilance, and altered physiological readiness.

Multi-match schedules, short turnarounds, late kickoffs, unfamiliar beds and heightened cognitive arousal can all compress sleep opportunity and reduce sleep quality at the very time when athletes need it most.

The goal isn’t perfect sleep – it is consistency and protecting one’s sleep opportunities. Teams must make sleep a priority and stop stealing it through poorly timed meetings, recovery sessions or media obligations.

Prioritising sleep and recovery could be the difference between falling at the group stages of the tournament and pushing deep into the final matches.

Michele Lastella, Senior Lecturer, CQUniversity Australia; Dean J. Miller, Senior Lecturer, Appleton Institute, HealthWise Research Group, CQUniversity Australia; Jacopo Vitale, Group Head at LUdeS University, Switzerland, and Matthew Driller, Associate Professor, Sport and Exercise Science, La Trobe University

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

The Australian Grand Prix launches the 2026 Formula 1 (F1) season at Melbourne’s Albert Park on Sunday.

While the US strikes on Iran forced many teams to change their travel plans, organisers are confident the event will go ahead without a hitch.

There is plenty to look out for as the F1 world turns its attention towards Melbourne: the season-opening race is the first of a new era, with changes to technical regulations, while Australian Oscar Piastri is ready to challenge for the drivers’ championship as the crowd watches to see if he can break a lengthy drought on home soil.

Key changes to technical regulations

While the cars will look similar to last season’s, they will be vastly different.

The core aim of the new regulations is to make racing more competitive and increase passing.

Compared with 2025, this year’s cars are smaller, more agile and use more electric power.

The Drag Reduction System (DRS) – an adjustable rear wing device to promote overtaking – has been phased out after being introduced in 2011.

Active aero is now part of the regulations – not just a grey area that teams have tried to exploit.

Active aero allows drivers to change the position of the front and rear wing to produce high drag for cornering (increasing downforce, grip and braking performance), or low drag to deliver more speed on straights.

The biggest regulation changes apply to the power units. The cars will keep their 1.6 litre, turbocharged V6 engines, but the hybrid system will be rebalanced, resulting in a roughly equal split between combustion and electric power.

With almost three times greater electrical power (an increase from 120 kilowatts to 350kW) available, drivers will need to manage the battery charge and deployment.

The cars are smaller and lighter than last season, with the wheelbase reduced by 200 millimetres (to a maximum of 3,400mm), total width reduced by 100mm (1,900mm max), and minimum vehicle weight by 30 kilograms, down to 768kg.

These changes are designed to increase agility and encourage more overtaking opportunities.

Why F1 made these changes

Technical resets are part of the competitive lifecycle in F1.

F1 teams build and unveil a new car every season because technical regulations are updated, and because the pace of development means last year’s design is unlikely to be fast enough to be competitive.

Major technical regulation resets happen every few years and 2026 is one of those bigger shifts.

Changes to technical regulations can improve racing, increase opportunities for previously struggling teams, and ensure innovation stays at the forefront.

Each revision challenges engineers to interpret the regulations with limited data, enabling early innovators to gain a competitive advantage.

This unpredictability can reinvigorate fans’ appeal as new contenders emerge.

The 2026 changes are also aimed at supporting sustainability ambitions.

F1 has committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the use of sustainable fuels reflects this. These commitments could help inform the development of new technologies that find their way into road cars, too.

What will the racing look like?

The lighter, smaller cars may produce more dynamic racing, particularly on narrower street circuits where the smaller cars are more manoeuvrable.

The introduction of active aero should also add a tactical layer, as drivers adjust their wing settings to balance cornering grip and straight line speed.

The increased electrical output of the power units though have raised concerns from some, including four-time world champion Max Verstappen, that F1 racing might resemble Formula E.

Formula E cars run exclusively on battery electrical systems, making energy management central to race strategy: drivers must balance speed with battery conservation, often lifting off the throttle early to regenerate energy through braking.

With battery management, electrical regeneration and deployment all becoming more strategic than before, we will have to wait and see.

Piastri’s weight of expectation

After coming agonisingly close to winning the World Drivers’ Championship last season, the hopes of a nation hang with Piastri.

Australia has produced F1 world champions (Jack Brabham and Alan Jones) but has never produced a winner of the Australian Grand Prix.

Since its move from Adelaide (1985–95) to Albert Park in 1996, the Australian race has opened the F1 season on 23 occasions, meaning it has been the debut race for many drivers.

While many drivers have been successful in their home races – including German Michael Schumacher (four victories at Hockenheim), UK driver Lewis Hamilton (eight wins at Silverstone) and Verstappen from the Netherlands (three victories at Zandvoort) – none of these have coincided with the first race of a season and the implementation of new technical regulations.

Piastri will have to manage the weight of expectation combined with the demands of driving a new car under new regulations, adding a substantial psychological load in his pursuit of a home race win.

His calm and analytical approach to racing should position him well to find early performance in the new car.

But it’s not just about the driver – team performance and competitors’ adaptation will all play a role in whether Piastri is crowned champion at the end of the season.

The stage is set

So, the stage is set in Melbourne for the next chapter of F1, with Piastri Australia’s best title chance in recent times.

Changes to technical regulations rarely produce a predictable outcome. Drivers and teams go through periods of learning and experimenting to find performance.

The Australian Grand Prix is more than the start of a new season. It is the beginning of a new competitive landscape, where local fans will wait with bated breath to see whether Piastri can finally break the Australian GP hoodoo.

Dan van den Hoek, Senior Lecturer, Clinical Exercise Physiology, University of the Sunshine Coast; Anthony Bedford, Associate Professor of Data Science and Senior Performance Analyst, University of the Sunshine Coast, and Bridgette O'Malley, Associate Lecturer (Sport and Exercise Science), University of the Sunshine Coast

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

About one in two Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer by age 70. The most dangerous kind is melanoma, which develops in skin cells called melanocytes that have been overexposed to the sun.

Common moles also develop from melanocytes, and appear as small dark marks or bumps on your skin. They are usually harmless growths, but any individual mole has a low risk of developing into a melanoma.

The more moles you have, the more likely one may become malignant. So a high “mole count” is one of the strongest risk factors for melanoma.

But there’s good news. Over the last 25 years, our team of researchers has tracked the number of moles on almost 4,000 Australian children and observed a nearly 50% drop in that period. Here’s what we found.

Why moles matter

Most Australian children develop moles, with the average teenager having 50 moles by age 15. They are most common in people with paler skin who are exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation (UV).

People with more than 100 moles are seven times more likely to develop melanoma during their lifetime, compared to those with fewer than 15 moles.

Other risk factors for melanoma include having paler skin or hair colour, a family history of unusual moles or melanoma, and certain genetic conditions.

What we studied, and what we found

In the early 1990s, our research team began the Brisbane Twin Nevus Study.

Each year, we examined 12-year-old twins and their siblings living in sun-drenched south-east Queensland. We studied twins because they can help us measure how both genetic and environmental factors affect mole count.

In total, we followed 3,957 children in the years between 1992 and 2016. We found the average number of moles on children’s bodies fell by 47% over that period.

Based on this drop, we predict this would reduce these children’s lifetime risk of developing melanoma by four times, compared to children born in the 1980s.

It is hard to know exactly what caused this halving of childhood mole numbers. But our best explanation is that better sun protection and avoidance in early childhood has led to this drop.

The success of ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’

Research suggests children today, compared to kids in the 1990s and 2000s, are getting less UV exposure before age 12. We calculated that our observed drop in mole count between 1992 and 2016 could be explained by the average UV exposure dropping by 12%.

This is most likely the result of decades of sun safety campaigns which encouraged parents, schools, and communities to take UV protection seriously.

The “Slip, Slop, Slap” campaign is the most well-known example. It was launched by the Cancer Council in 1981. Thanks to a board short-wearing seagull and sun-smart jingle, this campaign has become an iconic part of Australian culture.

As researchers, it’s hard to establish a clear link between the impact of public health messaging and measurable health outcomes. But one 2023 study examined the sun protection practices in 25 Queensland childcare centres. It found centres which required children to wear sun-smart clothing saw a 25% decrease in the number of moles found in kids aged five and under.

But parents can’t be complacent

A 47% drop in childhood mole numbers is worth celebrating. But the work doesn’t stop there.

Parents must be especially careful about sunburn. Sunburn is a sign your skin has been damaged by too much sun exposure. And repeated sunburns in childhood are one of the strongest risk factors for melanoma later in life.

Parents can also look out for any unusual moles on their child’s skin. Especially in children, moles are usually benign and very rarely turn into a melanoma. But if your child has a mole which changes in size, shape or colour, it’s best to get it assessed by a doctor.

And don’t forget about sun-smart habits. Our study reinforces the fact early sun protection, such as applying sunscreen, wearing hats and long-sleeved shirts, works. And they are easy to build into your family’s routine.

Many Australian parents are already teaching their kids about sun safety. But our study shows their everyday efforts, coupled with strong public health messaging, can save lives.

David Duffy, Research Fellow, Genetic Epidemiology Lab, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and Nick Martin, Head of the Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

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

Just like in the modern world, people in ancient times wanted to know how to live a long and healthy life.

Greeks and Romans heard fantastic tales of far-away peoples living to well beyond 100.

Greek essayist Lucian (about 120–180 CE) writes:

Indeed, there are even whole nations that are very long-lived, like the Seres [Chinese], who are said to live 300 years: some attribute their old age to the climate, others to the soil and still others to their diet, for they say that this entire nation drinks nothing but water. The people of Athos are also said to live 130 years, and it is reported that the Chaldeans live more than 100, using barley bread to preserve the sharpness of their eyesight.

Whatever the truth of these tales, many ancient Greeks and Romans wanted a long and healthy life.

This is how they thought this could happen.

An ancient doctor’s perspective

Ancient doctors were interested in what people who lived long lives were doing every day and how this might have helped.

The Greek physician Galen (129–216 CE), for example, discusses two people he knew personally in Rome who lived to old age.

First, there is a grammarian (someone who studies and teaches grammar) called Telephus, who lived to almost 100.

According to Galen, Telephus ate just three times a day. His diet was simple:

gruel boiled in water mixed with raw honey of the best quality, and this alone was enough for him at the first meal. He also dined at the seventh hour or a little sooner, taking vegetables first and next tasting fish or birds. In the evening, he used to eat only bread, moistened in wine that had been mixed.

Galen also tells us Telephus had some bathing habits that might seem unusual to us today. Telephus preferred to be massaged with olive oil every day and only have a bath a few times a month:

He was in the habit of bathing twice a month in winter and four times a month in summer. In the seasons between these, he bathed three times a month. On the days he didn’t bathe, he was anointed around the third hour with a brief massage.

Second, there was an old doctor named Antiochus, who lived into his 80s.

According to Galen, Antiochus also had a simple diet.

In the morning, Antiochus usually ate toasted bread with honey. Then, at lunch, he would eat fish, but usually only fish “from around the rocks and those from the deep sea”. For dinner, he would eat “either gruel with oxymel [a mix of vinegar and honey] or a bird with a simple sauce”.

Alongside this simple diet, Antiochus went for a walk every morning. He also liked to be driven in a chariot, or had his slaves carry him in a chair around the city.

Galen also said Antiochus “performed the exercises suitable for an old man”:

There is one thing you should do for old people in the early morning as an exercise: after massage with oil, next get them to walk about and carry out passive exercises without becoming fatigued, taking into account the capacity of the old person.

Galen concludes that Antiochus’ routine probably contributed to his good health well into advanced age:

Looking after himself in old age in this way, Antiochus continued on until the very end, unimpaired in his senses and sound in all his limbs.

Galen stresses that Telephus and Antiochus had some obvious things in common. They ate just a few times a day; their diet was of wild meats, whole grains, bread and honey; and they kept active every day.

What can you do?

Not all of us can live to 100 or more, as the Greeks and Romans were well aware.

However, Lucian offers us some consolation in his essay On Octogenarians:

On every soil and in every climate people who observe the proper exercise and the diet most suitable for health have been long-lived.

Lucian advised that we should imitate the lifestyles of people who have lived long and healthy lives if we want to do the same.

So, if you lived in Rome in the 2nd century CE, people like Telephus and Antiochus, who had a simple diet and kept active all their lives, would be good role models.

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.

Irritability is one of the most common and distressing problems teenagers and their families face.

Its main symptom is an excessive reaction to negative emotional stimuli, resulting in temper outbursts and severe irritable mood.

While current treatment options such as psychotherapy and medications are helpful for some, they can be inaccessible or poorly tolerated.

Our new research, based on a double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial, shows broad-spectrum micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) can significantly reduce severe irritability in teenagers. Teens with severely disruptive behaviour experienced especially large improvements.

This offers a safe, scalable and biologically grounded alternative to conventional psychiatric treatments.

Urgent need for more effective treatments

Irritability cuts across many psychiatric presentations, including anxiety, depression, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other disruptive behaviour disorders.

The need for interventions that directly target irritability, have fewer side effects and are available to all communities is urgent.

Statistics on mental health in young people are especially concerning. Youth mental health has been declining globally over the past two decades and has now reached a “dangerous phase”, according to a Lancet commission.

Despite this, research consistently highlights a lack of effective and accessible treatments for severely irritable youth. This suggests a significant unmet public health need.

Our research findings are based on the Balancing Emotions of Adolescents with Micronutrients (BEAM) trial, in which 132 unmedicated teenagers (aged 12 to 17) with moderate to severe irritability were randomly assigned to micronutrients (taken as four pills three times a day) or an active placebo for eight weeks. They were monitored monthly online by a clinical psychologist.

The placebo response was high, suggesting that simply participating in the study helped many teens feel able to improve their behaviour. But micronutrients still outperformed the placebo across key clinical measures such as irritability, emotional reactivity and overall improvement.

We saw the strongest effects in teenagers with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD), with 64% responding to micronutrients compared to 12.5% on placebo. This demonstrates an unusually large effect for a psychiatric intervention.

Parents of participants receiving micronutrients rated the teens’ conduct and prosocial behaviour much higher compared with those of teens on placebo.

Micronutrient treatment was also associated with more rapid improvements in clinician‑rated irritability, parent‑reported dysphoria and teen‑reported quality of life, stress and prosocial behaviours.

One of the most notable and reassuring findings was that suicidal ideation, which about a quarter of study participants reported at the start of the trial, improved over time for both groups, but with a greater change for teens on micronutrients. Self-harm behaviour also decreased for both groups.

Only one side effect differed significantly between groups: diarrhoea was more common on micronutrients (20.9%) than placebo (6.2%). But this side effect was typically temporary and resolved by taking the nutrients with food and water.

A minority (fewer than 10%) found swallowing pills a challenge. Other side effects reported equally in both groups included occasional headaches, stomach aches or a dry mouth. These tended to dissipate within the first few weeks.

Socioeconomic background matters

The response to treatment was moderated by the teens’ socioeconomic status.

Participants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to benefit from micronutrients. This is particularly meaningful for both clinical practice and public health.

Lower socioeconomic status is typically associated with greater exposure to nutritional insufficiencies, chronic stress, reduced access to health services and higher rates of mental health difficulties.

Our findings suggest micronutrients may help address underlying nutritional vulnerabilities that may be more prevalent or more severe in disadvantaged groups.

This pattern also indicates that micronutrient supplementation, if publicly funded, could function as a low‑cost, scalable intervention, with the potential to reduce health inequities.

Many evidence‑based psychosocial or pharmacological treatments require resources – time, transportation, specialist access – that disproportionately disadvantage lower‑income families.

In our trial, all meetings between the psychologist and the teen with their family were conducted online and the micronutrients were couriered across the country, making this intervention accessible, particularly to rural communities.

Micronutrients may represent an intervention that is both accessible and responsive to the specific needs of youth who are most at risk yet often least well served by traditional care pathways.

This study was developed alongside Māori health providers and fits within a tikanga (traditional) Māori framework. It had a high percentage of Māori participants (27%) and worked closely with them, their families and health providers to assist in improving mental health outcomes.

The BEAM trial provides robust evidence that a simple nutritional approach can meaningfully improve symptoms, including emotional reactivity, conduct difficulties and even suicidal ideation.

These results are relevant for parents, clinicians, teachers and policymakers seeking safe and practical interventions, especially for young people who cannot access or do not respond well to existing treatments. The results also highlight important equity implications, as teens from lower income families showed stronger responses.

Our results cast a new lens on the cause of some psychiatric problems, often conceptualised as chemical imbalances or family dysfunction. They reframe some cases of irritability as a possible nutritional and metabolic vulnerability, one that might be addressed with greater attention to the quality of our food alongside some supplementation with broad-spectrum micronutrients.

Julia J Rucklidge, Professor of Psychology, University of Canterbury; Angela Sherwin, PhD Candidate in Nutrition, University of Canterbury; Joseph Boden, Professor of Psychology, Director of the Christchurch Health and Development Study, University of Otago, and Roger Mulder, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Otago

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

Last week, one of Australia’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, Toby Walsh, warned Australia’s lack of guardrails for AI is putting young people at risk of being “sacrificed for the profits of big tech”.

Walsh’s remarks came after the government scrapped its own proposal to establish an advisory body of AI experts. Instead, the government offered its National AI Plan, which, among others, stresses investment in data centres, telecommunications infrastructure, and workforce training.

The plan also envisages an “AI Safety Institute” (currently recruiting staff), and also some internal AI transparency measures for the public sector. Transparency results so far have not been great.

What does it all add up to for AI regulation in Australia?

What are other countries doing?

The European Union has attracted attention for its AI Act, which already prohibits such things as using AI systems to exploit vulnerable groups or individuals. However, Europe is struggling to implement rules on high-risk AI uses that are not prohibited.

Several governments in Australia’s region are also passing AI laws, mainly to give themselves the powers to respond when they deem it necessary.

South Korea, Japan and Taiwan – none of them minor AI players – all have newly minted laws, which are meeting the expected pushback from industry.

Not everyone has comprehensive rules

There are countries without any kind of comprehensive AI regulation, including the United States and the United Kingdom.

In the US, president Donald Trump has even prohibited most state-based regulation in relation to private AI uses. Despite the anti-safeguards language, the government has quietly retained strong safeguards for federal use of AI.

The UK has followed an even more erratic path, to end up in a similar place to Australia. Incapable of deciding what to do, it has tried to provide technical (non-legal) safeguards. This has been done through the creation of the first AI Safety (now Security) Agency, hailed by some, derided by others.

The dilemma of control

The differences in approach between countries are not surprising. Governments face the dilemma of control described by English technology scholar David Collingridge almost 50 years ago:

when [regulatory] change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult and time consuming.

What’s more, Australia has limited regulatory clout regarding AI. It is not a significant global AI player in the way it is, for example, in mining, so its influence is limited.

Facing these uncertainties, what should Australia be doing?

Australia’s plan for AI safety

One certainty is that erratic behaviour is not a great option. We have good evidence that regulatory predictability matters for innovation.

In a recent speech, Australia’s Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, Andrew Charlton acknowledged this:

one of the important insurance policies we have is regulatory certainty, underpinned by clear principles with broad buy-in.

So, what is the government’s plan?

The official plan to keep Australians safe is a section (action 7) in the National AI Plan. It argues existing Australian frameworks “can apply to AI and other emerging technologies”.

In other words, AI systems and tools can be covered by the rules we already have, such as consumer protections against all misleading and deceptive practices. The government suggested this option back in 2024. (We have previously argued this view, favoured by the Productivity Commission, is not well supported and was not our preferred option.)

Problems with the plan

However, the challenges for applying existing laws, which the government identified years ago, have not gone away.

As we identified in 2023, the existing regulatory frameworks have limitations when it comes to AI.

AI systems are complex, they can act semi-autonomously, and it can be difficult to understand why they do what they do. This makes it very hard to effectively attribute liability or responsibility for AI risks or harms using existing laws and processes.

Regrettably, those limitations have not been addressed systematically – if at all.

Fragmented rules and limited resources

As things stand, the regulatory landscape is highly fragmented and uncertain.

For instance, there are at least 21 mandatory (or quasi-mandatory) state and federal policies about the use of AI in government. Courts have so far had little opportunity to clear things up, with almost no test cases in crucial areas of existing law, including negligence, administrative law, discrimination law, and consumer law.

The new plan is accompanied by a clear commitment to monitor the development and deployment of AI “and respond to challenges as they arise, and as our understanding of the strengths and limitations of AI evolves”.

The issue is: how will that monitoring happen? Will the government really “empower every existing agency across government to take responsibility for AI”?

Dealing with issues such as privacy, consumer protection, anti-discrimination will take money and commitment and a degree of coordination between agencies we have not witnessed to date.

An uncertain future

For predictability, signals matter. A lot.

If there is a change in government in the US in 2028, will that change how Australia regulates AI – in the same way the beginning of the Trump presidency coincided with the abandonment of Australia’s mandatory AI guardrails proposals?

Is a laissez-faire regulatory approach creating predictability, when we have so many stalled and part-completed regulatory processes?

The government seems to expect courts, government agencies, businesses and individuals to work out on their own how to retrofit old laws and institutions to a new technological landscape.

There is some hope for regulation of automated decision-making in the public sector (promised after the Robodebt Royal Commission). For the rest, it’s a “wait and see” approach to AI regulation. We’ll have to wait and see if it works.

José-Miguel Bello y Villarino, Senior Research Fellow, Sydney Law School, University of Sydney and Henry Fraser, Research Fellow in Law, Accountability and Data Science, Queensland University of Technology

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

In the leadup to the weekend’s US and Israeli attacks on Iran, the US Department of Defense was locked in tense negotiations with artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic over exactly how the Pentagon could use the firm’s technology.

Anthropic wanted guarantees its Claude systems would not be used for purposes such as domestic surveillance in the US and operating autonomous weapons without human control.

In response, US president Donald Trump on Friday directed all US federal agencies to cease using Anthropic’s technology, saying he would “never allow a radical left, woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars!”

Hours later, rival AI lab OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) announced it had struck its own deal with the Department of Defense. The key difference appears to be that OpenAI permits “all lawful uses” of its tools, without specifying ethical lines OpenAI won’t cross.

What does this mean for military AI? Is it the end for the idea of “ethical AI” in warfare?

AI companies and regulation

Last week’s events come at what was already a worrying time for AI ethics. The Trump administration last year banned states from regulating AI, claiming that it threatens innovation.

Meanwhile, many AI companies have aligned themselves with the administration, with executives including OpenAI boss Sam Altman making million-dollar donations to Trump’s inauguration fund. (Altman noted at the time that he has also donated to Democratic politicians.)

Anthropic has been less effusive, working on national security while warning that AI can sometimes undermine democracy and that current systems are not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.

An emerging international consensus

Much of the concern around military applications of AI has focused on lethal autonomous weapons systems. These are devices and software which can choose targets and attack them without human intervention.

Just a few years ago, an international consensus about the risks of these weapons seemed to be emerging among governments and technology companies.

In February 2020 the US Department of Defense announced principles for the use of AI across the entire organisation: it needed to be responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable and governable.

Likewise, in 2021 NATO formulated similar principles, as did the United Kingdom in 2022.

The US plays a unique leading role among its international allies in shaping global norms around military conduct. These principles signalled to countries such as Russia, China, Brazil and India how the US and its allies believed military use of AI should be governed.

Military AI and private enterprise

Military AI has relied extensively on partnerships with private industry, as the most advanced technology has been developed by private companies.

Project Maven, which set out in 2017 to increase the use of machine learning and data integration in US military intelligence, relied heavily on commercial tech companies.

The US Defense Innovation Board noted in 2019 that in AI the key data, knowledge and personnel are all in the private sector.

This is still the case today. However, the norms around how AI should be used are shifting rapidly, both in government and in much of the industry.

Trump and Silicon Valley

When Trump was re-elected in 2024, many in Silicon Valley welcomed the prospect of less regulation. Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, author of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, claimed Trump’s victory “felt like a boot off the throat”.

Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of AI-powered data analytics company Palantir, has been another vocal Trump backer. OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman personally gave US$25 million to a Trump-supporting organisation last year.

We are a long way from the days of 2019 and 2020.

AI ethics assumes democratic norms

The question of whether an AI-enabled system is ethical or not is often seen as a question about the technology itself, rather than how it is used.

In this view, with the right design you can make an inherently ethical AI system. This often includes “algorithmic transparency” – being clear and honest about the rules the system uses to make decisions. The idea here is that ethics can be “baked in” to these rules.

The idea of ethical military AI also assumes it is operating under democratic principles. The idea behind algorithmic transparency is that “the people” should know how these systems work, because “the people” ultimately hold power in a democracy.

However, in an autocratic regime it doesn’t matter how transparent the algorithms are. There is no sense that civilians have a stake, and deserve to know what their government is doing, that its activities are in accordance with the law.

Free and public discussion is often seen as a key feature of liberal democracies. While eventual consensus may be valued, constructive disagreement and even conflict can be signs of a healthy democracy.

Decisions and consequences

In this light, Anthropic’s desire to have genuine discussions with the government about ethical red lines is an example of democratic practice in action. The company signalled both a desire for reasoned communication and the value of constructive disagreement.

In return, the Trump administration on Friday labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a rare designation previously only given to foreign companies, with secretary of defense Pete Hegseth writing that

effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.

Anthropic plans to challenge the declaration in court, as it may have profound economic and reputational consequences for the company.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has largely conceded that it will have no ethical limits, only legal ones. As a result, it is open for business with the US government – but faces reputational consequences of its own as consumer backlash mounts.

AI in a world without democratic norms

What does it all mean for ethical AI in the military? One hard-to-avoid conclusion is that if we want military AI to be used in an ethical way – following transparent rules and laws – we need strong democratic norms, which are in peril as the rules-based international order crumbles.

So far, little has changed in practice. Mere hours after Trump’s denunciation of Anthropic, the US launched strikes on Iran – reportedly planned with the aid of the company’s software.

Bianca Baggiarini, Lecturer, International Relations, Deakin University

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

In February of this year, the media in New Zealand both captivated and horrified the public with sensational stories of dog attacks.

That line could have been written last week. It wasn’t. It appeared in an article in the New Zealand Law Journal more than two decades ago.

The recent attacks that led to the death of a woman in Northland and left a father and son critically injured in Christchurch have once again forced dog control into the national conversation. But the sense of déjà vu is hard to ignore.

Writing in that article back in 2003, legal scholar Jill Jones was responding to a similar spate of attacks and the government’s proposed amendments to the Dog Control Act 1996.

Those changes were touted at the time as “significant and comprehensive”. In reality, they focused narrowly on banning the importation of particular breeds and introducing new classifications of “menacing” dogs.

The legislation was enacted within months, despite concerns it would do little to reduce attacks and risked becoming kneejerk lawmaking: a response to moral panic rather than to the underlying causes of the problem.

Reform in name, not in effect

Ultimately, the concerns were well founded. The legislation did little to solve the problem of dog attacks. In fact, a 2022 study published in the New Zealand Medical Journal showed that the problem has got steadily worse.

Those researchers identified “a nearly eight-fold increase in the risk of hospitalisation from a dog bite injury compared to forty years ago, with an incidence of 1.7 per 100,000 in 1979 rising to 13.4 per 100,000 in 2018/19”.

They also note that “this increase has come about despite regional attempts by each territorial authority at addressing this worsening problem”.

Thus, stories with sensational headlines such as “Deadly surge: Councils warn more deaths likely under weak dog laws” need to be read in context.

Despite the recent interest by news media – and the moral panic it might provoke – the awful attacks that occurred earlier this year are not out of the norm: this is a persistent issue. The public’s worry and its demands to address the problem are also entirely justifiable.

Soothing that worry will require much more emotional responses from politicians calling the owners of dogs who attack “feral” and “degenerate” and calling for stricter punishments.

Local Government Minister Simon Watts, who is in charge of the issue, has stated that “overhauling the Dog Control Act is not something that we have capacity for this term”. That raises the prospect that any short-term action will once again take the form of piecemeal, regional and ultimately ineffective responses.

Already, some local authorities have begun reviewing their bylaws in response to the media focus and public concern it has generated. However, no efforts are underway to develop a national solution.

From punishment to prevention

If the government is serious about reducing dog attacks, it would need to engage with expert advice and consider major reform.

The Dog Control Act turns 30 this year. While it has been amended over time, its core structure remains largely unchanged. Experts have long questioned its effectiveness and whether its decentralised design – which delegates the responsibility for dog control to local authorities – is still fit for purpose in addressing today’s patterns of dog ownership and harm.

This is one reason why the SPCA last week wrote an open letter to parliament calling for, among other things, a “comprehensive overhaul” of the act that would “replace outdated breed-specific provisions with evidence-based, nationally consistent risk management tools focused on individual dog behaviour and responsible ownership”.

Current legislation requires all councils to have the basics – such as a registration system and dog control officers – but leaves the details of implementing dog control policy to each individual council.

This explains the extreme regional variation in fees, educational programmes and enforcement. The 2022 study found a “seven-fold difference in the incidence of dog bites between territorial authorities with the highest and lowest rates of dog-bite injury”.

Another report found Invercargill has five times the number of prosecutions compared to Wellington, despite similar levels of registered dogs and reported attacks.

With an estimated 830,000 dogs in New Zealand, many people have important relationships with them, whether they be companions or colleagues.

There is a need for thoughtful, evidence-based policymaking that reflects the place of dogs in society and the nature of human–dog relationships. It should also consider which regulatory systems – including overseas models – have been shown to reduce harm.

Addressing the issue effectively requires national coordination and long-term planning, rather than inconsistent regional responses or short-term measures aimed primarily at easing political pressure. Any reform should focus on preventing attacks, not simply responding to them after the fact.

Progress on that work is overdue, given the harm experienced by victims and the broader responsibility to ensure safe and responsible dog ownership.

Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere, Associate Professor of Law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

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

Some mornings, you wake up and the dream is right there. Clear and vivid. You might still feel the emotion in your chest, and it can take a few minutes to remember where you are and what was real.

Other mornings, you open your eyes and there is nothing. Just a quiet sense of having slept.

You might know people who think they do not dream. However, the reality is we all do. Sometimes we have many in one night.

What varies is whether people remember their dreams and how often they remember them.

Dream recall myth vs reality

During the night, we cycle through periods of light sleep, deep sleep and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. A full cycle takes about 90 minutes.

People generally spend more time in deep sleep in the first half of the night and more time in REM sleep in the second half.

The main function of deep sleep is restorative: to replenish energy, repair our bodies and help store memories.

REM sleep is important for memory consolidation and emotional processing. Later in the night, REM sleep becomes longer. This is the stage most closely linked to vivid, emotional dreaming.

If you wake up during or just after REM sleep, you are much more likely to remember a dream. If you wake from deep sleep, you probably will not, even though you were dreaming earlier. It isn’t a sign something is wrong; it’s simply how the sleeping brain works.

Another myth is dreams only happen in REM sleep. While REM dreams tend to be more intense and story-like, dreaming can happen in other stages, too; they are just often quieter and harder to recall.

So if you wake up some mornings with a clear recollection of your dream, and other mornings with nothing at all, that is completely normal. It doesn’t mean you didn’t dream. It just means you woke up at a different point in your sleep cycle.

Why do some people remember their dreams more often?

Several factors affect whether you recall dreams.

As you get older, your capacity to recall dreams decreases. Some studies suggest women are more likely to remember dreams than men. Some medications, such as antidepressants and sedatives, can affect your dream recall.

Timing plays a big role. We spend more time in REM sleep later in the night, so dreams that happen closer to morning are easier to remember. Waking up briefly during the night offers a chance to remember dreams before they fade. That’s why parents of young children and light sleepers, who are more likely to wake up from REM sleep, often report remembering more dreams.

How you wake up also matters. If someone jolts you awake, the dream can vanish in an instant. But if you are woken gently, someone softly calling your name, there is a better chance the dream lingers long enough for you to remember.

Some people are naturally “high recallers” and are just better at capturing their dreams before they fade. And therefore, they consistently remember dreams.

Why do some dreams feel intense?

Dreams can sometimes feel highly emotional, dramatic or unusually vivid. This is largely because REM sleep, the stage most associated with dreaming, involves increased activation of regions of the brain that control our emotions, such as the amygdala and limbic system.

This occurs alongside relatively reduced activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex that regulate logic and emotional control.

Stress, life changes or heightened emotions can make dreams feel more intense. Dreams often reflect elements of real-life experiences as the brain tries to process events from the day and consolidate them into long-term memory.

In most cases, having intense dreams is entirely normal and part of healthy emotional processing.

So is dreaming a reflection of good sleep?

Remembering your dreams does not automatically mean you had poor sleep, and forgetting them does not mean your sleep was perfect.

Rather than using dream recall as an indicator of sleep quality, it is more helpful to focus on how you feel during the day. Indicators such as feeling rested on waking and daytime energy provide a more meaningful indicator of your sleep health.

For most people, differences in dream recall and dream intensity are normal and shouldn’t cause concern. Dream frequency varies widely among people and across lifespans.

However, it may be helpful to seek advice from a health professional if:

• you experience persistent daytime exhaustion despite adequate time in bed

• nightmares are frequent, highly distressing or interfere with your mood and functioning

• sleep is regularly disrupted by awakenings, panic or prolonged difficulty returning to sleep.

If you feel rested, functional and emotionally stable during the day, occasional vivid dreams or changes in recall are completely fine and simply part of how healthy sleep unfolds.

Yaqoot Fatima, Professor of Sleep Health, University of the Sunshine Coast; Danielle Wilson, Research Fellow and Sleep Scientist at the Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast, and Nisreen Aouira, Research Program Manager, Let's Yarn About Sleep, Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

Black sesame is the latest plant-based product to go viral, with its appealing colour and nutty taste.

Social media is full of claims these dark sesame seeds are better for you than the white ones. They’re said to be better at reducing your blood sugar levels, risk of heart disease, and even reversing grey hair.

But is black sesame really the new matcha? You might remember this green tea was another plant-based, viral sensation with potential health benefits.

What is black sesame? What’s in it?

Sesame seeds grow in white, yellow and black varieties. They’ve been used for centuries in traditional Asian cuisine.

Today, they’re used in both savoury and sweet dishes, and are a good source of protein. Due to sesame’s high fat content (about 50–64%, see table below) it is also valued for its oil.

But there are differences between black and white sesame in some key nutrients.

Black sesame has higher levels of fat, protein and carbohydrate, but is also higher in energy (kilojoules). Vitamin and mineral levels are also generally higher in black sesame.

Sesame seeds are clearly highly nutritious products, but the amounts of nutrients in the table are for 100 grams, which is about two-thirds of a metric cup. Most of us would find it hard to eat this every day.

Typically sesame seeds are eaten as a garnish for stir-frys, curries and bread. In some cultures they are used more widely as a major ingredient in discretionary foods that also contain sugar and fat – such as halva, biscuits, tahini paste and sesame seed bars.

Sesame seeds also contain anti-nutrients. These are natural compounds, such as oxalic acid and phytic acid. These bind to minerals (iron, calcium and zinc) and reduce how much the body can absorb and use.

For most of us, eating foods in normal quantities that contain oxalate and phytic acid is not a concern. But if you have a known deficiency, increasing your intake of sesame seeds is not a good idea. If this applies to you, it is worth discussing with an accredited practising dietitian.

What about antioxidants?

Free radicals are formed naturally as a byproduct of all our usual bodily processes such as breathing and moving, as well as from UV (ultraviolet) light exposure, smoking, air pollutants and industrial chemicals. These can damage our proteins, cell membranes and DNA.

Sesame seeds contain antioxidants, chemicals that “mop up” these free radicals so they cannot cause damage.

One study found higher levels of phenols (a type of antioxidant) in black sesame seeds compared to white ones.

Black sesame also contains higher levels of lignans, an important group of phenols, than white sesame.

Cell and animal studies have looked at sesamin, the main type of lignan. These demonstrate its antioxidant properties, as well as cholesterol-lowering, blood pressure-reducing and anti-tumour effects.

But higher antioxidant levels don’t always automatically translate into proven health benefits.

Is black sesame healthy?

BMI, blood pressure and cholesterol

A systematic review, which included the results of six studies with a total of 465 participants, looked into the health benefits of sesame. This included any type of sesame as either a seed, oil or capsule.

The authors reported a statistically significant decrease in BMI (body-mass index), blood pressure and cholesterol. Sesame doses were 0.06–35g/day over four to eight weeks. But not all these studies compared it to a placebo, were double-blinded (when neither participants nor researchers know who is receiving a particular treatment or placebo) and in some of the included studies medications were still being used.

Because of this the authors said the evidence was of low quality, and so could not make any health recommendations.

Only one study in the review looked at black sesame seed specifically. This looked at the effect of taking 2.52g a day as capsules compared with a placebo for four weeks. It showed a drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number in your blood pressure reading) from about 129 mmHg (a measure of blood pressure) to about 121 mmHg in people with prehypertension (blood pressure slightly higher than normal).

Grey hair

I could find no scientific studies that have looked at black sesame seeds and hair colour.

Similarly there is no current evidence any specific food or supplement can reverse grey hair.

Any risks?

Yes, about 0.1–0.9% of the population around the world have a sesame allergy, a rate that appears to be rising.

Like all food allergies, the symptoms can be mild to severe. An anaphylactic response requires emergency medical treatment.

So what should I do?

The rise of black sesame does present a new ingredient you can enjoy in your cooking. If it doesn’t appeal, regular sesame seeds are also an option.

Given the small amounts we typically eat, it won’t make an overall difference to your health if you prefer black or white sesame seeds.

And as for black sesame to reverse grey hair, don’t count on it.

Ensuring you have a wide and varied diet is the best way to ensure you get all the nutrients you need for optimal physical and mental health.

Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, Adelaide University

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

A common mould has killed two people, and left four others seriously ill, at one of Sydney’s largest hospitals.

Health authorities a cluster of fungal infections at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’s transplant unit.

Six patients developed infections between October and December 2025 after being exposed to Aspergillus, a common mould found in soil, plants, dust and damp environments.

In a statement, a hospital spokesperson suggested the mould may have been present at nearby construction sites, part of the hospital’s A$940 million redevelopment.

So what is Aspergillus? And should you be concerned?

It’s a common mould?

Yes. Aspergillus moulds are a type of filamentous fungi, meaning they form long chains, and are usually found in soil, plants and damp areas.

This type of mould is usually harmless to healthy people. But it can cause a severe respiratory disease called aspergillosis. Aspergillosis affects about 250,000 people around the world.

How can Aspergillus harm?

This type of mould produces airborne spores, which people may inhale into their lungs.

There, these spores can cause an infection in the smallest chambers of the lungs. This is because they release toxins and enzymes that damage lung tissue. These spores can spread to other parts of the body such as the brain, kidneys, heart or skin, causing further infection.

Symptoms of an infection include fever, cough and chest pain. You may have trouble breathing or might start coughing up blood. Aspergillus can also cause skin and eye infections.

Who is most vulnerable?

Our immune systems can generally fight Aspergillus infections. But people with weakened immune systems have a much higher risk of developing an infection.

These include people having chemotherapy, corticosteroid treatment, or organ or stem cell transplants. Transplant patients are particularly vulnerable. This is because their immune system must be deliberately weakened to stop their body rejecting the transplanted organ. If they somehow inhale Aspergillus spores, the fungus can more easily take hold in their lungs.

Dormant spores in the lungs of transplant patients may also cause infection when the spores are activated. But health authorities did not indicate this occurred at the Sydney hospital.

One large US study found just 59% of organ transplant recipients and 25% of stem cell transplant patients were still alive one year after developing invasive aspergillosis.

People with asthma may develop allergies to Aspergillus even if their immune systems are healthy. And it can cause severe allergic reactions in people with cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition in which sticky mucus blocks their airways. People with other lung conditions such as tuberculosis, influenza or COVID are also at a higher risk of developing an Aspergillus infection.

What are the treatment options?

Aspergillus can be treated with antifungal drugs such as itraconazole and corticosteroids. This treatment is most effective when we detect the infection early.

But researchers have identified strains of Aspergillus that don’t respond to this kind of treatment. So antifungal resistance is an urgent problem.

What else do I need to know?

Aspergillus infections are relatively uncommon in the general population. And they are rare in hospitals, where wards and rooms are usually fitted with high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters. These filters capture and remove potentially harmful particles from the air.

However, construction work may disturb the soil near or around the hospital, releasing a high number of Aspergillus spores into the air. This increases the risk of hospitals having clusters of infection. It remains unclear whether this is what happened at The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

Thomas Jeffries, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology, Western Sydney University and Charles Oliver Morton, Senior Lecturer in Medical Microbiology, Western Sydney University

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

More than 1,300 Victorians have joined a class action against Johnson & Johnson alleging its talcum powder products left them with ovarian cancer, mesothelioma (cancer affecting the lungs) and other cancers affecting the reproductive organs.

This follows lawsuits in the United Kingdom and the United States, including a prominent case in California. In December 2025, Johnson & Johnson was forced to pay two women US$40 million after a jury found its baby powder was dangerous and that it had failed to warn consumers.

Talc is a naturally occurring mineral mined in many parts of the world. People can come into contact with it during mining and processing, industrial applications, and more commonly, through its use in cosmetics and body powders.

People use talc on their genitals to absorb moisture, reduce friction, disguise odours, or to reduce skin rashes and chafing. Talc increases the opaqueness of face powders and cosmetics, leaving skin feeling smooth and soft.

So how is it linked to cancer? And what does the scientific evidence say?

Contamination with asbestos

Since the 1970s, questions have emerged about whether talc could be contaminated with asbestos. Asbestos is a cancer-causing agent that can affect the lungs when inhaled.

Talc and asbestos are minerals often found close to each other in the Earth, so there is potential for talc to be contaminated with asbestos during the mining process.

Since the 1970s, manufacturers have attempted to produce pure talcum powder free from asbestos. However, it’s unclear how routinely samples are tested and the extent of contamination over the past 50 years.

In 2023, Johnson & Johnson stopped selling talc in its products worldwide, including in Australia, switching instead to a cornflour base. Other manufacturers still sell talcum powder and it’s still used in cosmetics, as well as industrially.

What does the science say about the cancer link?

Two cancers have a possible link with talc use:

• lung cancer, due to the potential to inhale talc particles, which can occur with some types of jobs

• ovarian cancer, due to regular use of talcum powder in the genital area.

Some human studies have found products containing talc are linked with higher rates of ovarian cancer. Other studies have found no link.

Studies that examined the use of talc on the genital area found no evidence to suggest a link between talc and uterine or cervical cancer.

But there are several challenges to overcome when studying the link between talcum powder and cancer. It can be difficult to recall details about talc use (brand, amount, and so on) many years later. Some people who developed cancer will have died before being identified and studied, so won’t be included.

However, when researchers investigated how often participants used talc powder and compared those who used it frequently with those who didn’t, they found an increased risk of ovarian cancer among frequent users.

So what does it all mean?

When there are differing results from multiple studies, those results can be summarised together to answer the research question. So what does all the currently available evidence say about the relationship between talc usage and ovarian cancer?

This summary study concludes there appears to be a weak risk of some types of ovarian cancer, meaning it’s linked to a small increase in risk, but the reasons why remain unclear.

The evidence suggests talc does not increase the risk of other gynaecological cancers, such as uterine and cervical.

Talc contaminated with asbestos is clearly linked to an increased risk of lung cancer. However, cosmetic use of talc doesn’t seem to increase the risk of lung cancer because users don’t breathe it in.

In 2024 the World Health Organization (WHO) updated its advice to say that talc is “probably carcinogenic” which means it probably causes cancer in humans. This is the second-highest risk level for cancer, which includes the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) and red meat.

If you use talcum powder and are concerned about an increased risk of cancer, it’s recommended you stop using it or limit how much you use. As with all decisions in life, consider the balance between potential harms and benefits, especially if you’ve used talc for a long time and want to minimise your risk of getting cancer.

Tam Ha, Associate Professor of Cancer Epidemiology, University of Wollongong

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

Covering the courts can be a tough gig. The pace is fast, there are many legal considerations to be across, and media outlets are hungry for quality stories, quickly.

Our study aimed to capture the experience of senior reporters covering the courts in Melbourne and Victoria. We conducted in-depth inverviews with 12 journalists from five of the major media outlets in Victoria.

The journalists interviewed in our study described a justice system where secrecy is expanding, access to information is shrinking, and public-interest journalism is becoming increasingly difficult. These experiences point to an undermining of the open justice doctrine, which is a crucial component of liberal democracy.

Traditionally, journalists have played a crucial role in upholding open justice. Our interview data indicate that that the role of journalism in open justice is now being challenged by the Victorian judiciary.

This is how one senior reporter described how often Victorian courts breach the 2013 Open Courts Act.

Every day there are suppression orders that do not meet the basic requirements, especially in terms of providing reasons […]the requirement to give three days notice to the media is also routinely breached. (Ben Butler, investigative journalist, ABC)

Commissioned by the Melbourne Press Club, our report paints a troubling picture of how court suppression orders, limited access to court documents and constrained access to police and government sources are undermining journalists’ ability to scrutinise public institutions in Victoria.

Suppression orders in Victoria

Suppression orders are court orders restricting what can be published about an ongoing case. They are meant to be rare exceptions to the principle of open justice. But our study shows they have become and stayed routine in Victoria.

In our interviews, reporters allege that the act is routinely breached. Courts often fail to provide the required three days notice to media before issuing an order, and interim suppression orders, which require less justification, are increasingly granted and sometimes allowed to stand for months.

Journalists described a pattern where high‑profile defendants and their legal teams raise mental health concerns to justify anonymity. A recent example of this was the rape case against the youngest son of Carlton Football Club great Stephen Silvagni, Tom Silvagni. He was finally publicly named at the end of 2025 after a suppression order kept his identity secret for 545 days. The interviewees also highlighted inconsistent practices across courts and judicial officers, with little ability to challenge decisions in real time.

Restricting access to court documents

Another serious finding in our report is how difficult it has become for journalists – and by extension, the public – to access basic court information.

A decade ago, reporters could routinely obtain the brief of evidence at committal hearings. Today, many say they receive almost nothing. Without charge sheets, witness statements or indictments, journalists say they cannot accurately follow proceedings. This threatens the accuracy and completeness of their reporting.

Changes within the Magistrates’ Court have also obscured basic details. A key column indicating which police unit (such as homicide or counter‑terrorism) is involved in a matter has been removed from public listings, making it very hard to identify serious cases in advance.

The digitisation of court systems has further complicated the information access situation. Access varies between courts, fees for copies of documents are inconsistent, and many frontline court staff appear unsure what journalists are entitled to access and view.

One reporter summarised the situation:

We’re expected to fairly and accurately report on something with 1% of the information that’s actually available and before the court. So of course, prosecutors, or defence lawyers, or magistrates read the story and go, “oh, well, that’s [inaccurate]”. But we only knew one per cent of the story and we can only write what we have (Erin Pearson, court and justice reporter, The Age).

Relationship between courts and media has deteriorated

Several reporters said Victorian judicial officers are increasingly hostile toward the media, describing a “vibe shift” on the bench. Some recounted being removed from hearings, told they could not sit in court without submitting paperwork, or without a lawyer present.

Court media teams, which once held regular meetings with journalists and editors, no longer do so. Requests for meetings with chief judges have been declined or ignored. The researchers invited the chief magistrate, chief county court judge and chief justice of the Supreme Court to participate in the study, they all declined. This disengagement, we argue, is a finding in itself indicating little or no will from the Victorian courts in building trust with the public and media.

Access to government and police sources has weakened

Journalists also report declining access to human sources within police and the state government. Victoria Police no longer routinely provides the names of accused persons, making it harder for reporters to track the administration of justice on behalf of the public. Officers were described as increasingly reluctant to speak even off the record, fearing disciplinary action.

Within the state government, decision‑making authority over media access has become increasingly centralised in the premier’s private office. Some departments now provide statements with significant portions “on background”, information reporters may use but cannot attribute to its source.

A crisis for public accountability

Our benchmarking shows Australia already performs poorly by global standards of court transparency. Even within this context, Victoria stands out as one of the least open jurisdiction in the country.

Countries such as Sweden offer far greater public access to court files, including full police briefs and allow journalists to audio record court proceedings by default. The US and UK also provide broader access to court documents, supported by constitutional or statutory protections compared to Victoria and Australia.

Our report concludes that public interest journalism in Victoria is under significant strain, particularly in court reporting. The current situation threatens natural justice, democratic accountability and public trust in the legal system.

We make ten recommendations to the Melbourne Press Club in our report. Apart from a review of the implementation of the Open Courts Act Victoria, the core recommendation is the MPC acts as a facilitator to rebuild the broken relationship between the Victorian courts and the media outlets in the state. This would be in the public interest, which both the media and the courts should serve.

Johan Lidberg, Associate Professor, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University and Alicia McMillan, Head of Journalism, Monash University

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

The joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran represent a further erosion of the international legal order. Under international law, these attacks are neither preemptive nor lawful.

Israel and the United States launched Operation Shield of Judah and Operation Epic Fury while diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Tehran were actively underway on Iran’s nuclear program.

Just two days earlier, the most intense round of US-Iran talks concluded in Geneva, with both sides agreeing to continue. US President Donald Trump indicated he would give negotiators more time. Then came the bombs.

The illegality of the attack

Israel said the strikes were “preventive”, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat. But preventive war has no legal basis under international law. The UN Security Council did not authorise any military action, meaning the sole lawful pathway for the use of force for self-defence was never pursued.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Preemptive self-defence, as we have argued previously, has extremely narrow prescriptions under the Caroline doctrine. It requires a threat to be “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means”. No such conditions existed with Iran on February 28.

Central to the current crisis is that it was Trump who ended the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, which had regional support for controlling Iran’s nuclear program. The US director of national intelligence testified in March 2025 that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons, which the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency affirmed.

US intelligence also reportedly indicated it would take three years for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Moreover, US and Israeli strikes on Iran last year had put the program back by months. Trump claimed Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated.

Regime change by force is unlawful

Trump said the attacks were intended to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program and bring about regime change. Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government”, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the goal was to “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran”.

Forcible regime change violates the foundational principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention under the UN Charter.

The strikes targeted Iran’s supreme leader, president, and military chief of staff, as well as military infrastructure. Deliberately targeting heads of state also crosses a threshold that distinguishes military operations from acts of aggression.

Attacking heads of state is illegal under New York Convention, for obvious reasons of stability. With the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the power vacuum will only increase the hardship on the ground for Iranians.

In addition, promises to return the shah – Iran’s previous monarch – have not considered the authoritarian implications of such rule.

Reports that an airstrike on an elementary school in Minab killed at least 100 girls aged between seven and 12 underscore the human cost of unplanned regime change.

US and Israeli statements imply that regime change is prioritised over any plans of a replacement. But just like the aftermath of the death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi that saw slavery return to Libya, or how Islamic State filled the power vacuum after the death of dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq, regime change requires extremely careful planning.

In this case, there is no obvious plan to rebuild or stabilise Iran after these strikes. Western allies have expressed concern that Washington lacks a coherent strategy for the aftermath of the attacks, noting the minimal preparation for post-conflict reconstruction and government transition.

As Mexico’s representative stated at the UN Security Council following recent US actions in Venezuela, the historical record of regime change shows it has only “exacerbated conflicts and weakened the social and political fabric of nations”. According to The Atlantic, “complete chaos” is likely.

Diplomacy as deception

Launching strikes during active negotiations violates the principle of good faith in Article 2(2) of the UN Charter. As the Arms Control Association noted, Iranian policymakers had already accused the US of bad faith after the June 2025 strikes disrupted previously scheduled talks.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry denounced the February 28 attacks as striking during negotiations, violating international law.

World leaders’ response

We should be dismayed by the worrying acceptance of increased brazen illegality by Western leaders, including our own prime minister. Anthony Albanese has supported the strikes as “acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”. This places Australia, once again, in open contradiction with basic principles of liberal international order.

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement urging Iran to negotiate a solution, condemning Iranian retaliatory attacks. However, they did not directly comment on the US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Their silence is deafening.

Russia and China criticised the US-Israeli actions and urged an immediate end to military operations and a return to diplomatic negotiations.

The international legal order is now in free-fall. When powerful states conduct illegal wars under the guise of prevention, weaponise diplomacy as cover, and openly pursue regime change, the “rules-based order” is literally dead.

Shannon Brincat, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of the Sunshine Coast and Juan Zahir Naranjo Cáceres, PhD Candidate, Political Science, International Relations and Constitutional Law, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

As Ukrainian officials meet with US negotiators in Geneva with the possibility of full three-way talks involving Moscow, Kyiv and Washington in early March, there’s a glimmer of hope that an end to the conflict may be in sight. But the fact that after four years this remains a glimmer speaks volumes about the difficulties in ending the war.

Even Donald Trump, who promised to end the war in one day, has now stopped issuing ultimatums and deadlines to the warring parties.

In what has become a war of attrition, discussions about vulnerabilities and losses are only meaningful when compared with those of the opposing side. Reflecting on how each side’s theories of victory changed over the four years helps to grasp the war’s overall trajectory.

Russia’s initial plan for a swift knockout of Ukraine was foiled within the first few days of the invasion. Instead, it settled into a conflict of grinding the enemy down through slow advances on the battlefield and debilitating attacks on the energy infrastructure in the rear, with the expectation in Moscow that at some point Ukraine would throw in the towel.

But the question is whether Russia has enough manpower and economic resources for this strategy.

Russia is finally experiencing economic difficulties due to a combination of western sanctions and falling oil prices, which fell from over US$100 (£74) per barrel in 2022 to approximately $60 in 2025. In 2026, the Kremlin had to raise taxes and reduce its reliance on oil, whose share of Russia’s budget fell from 40% in 2019 to 25% in 2025. Perhaps the Kremlin is beginning to realise that this cannot continue forever.

But Russia’s weakness is relative to that of Ukraine. This applies to war losses: Putin believes that Ukraine’s manpower losses are higher than Russia’s (which flies in the face of what some western researchers estimate) and that Ukraine, with a much smaller population than Russia, has much less staying power.

Ukraine’s theory of victory, meanwhile, has evolved from a belief in an outright military victory in 2022–23, to just trying to exhaust Russia’s military in 2025 by using the “wall of drones”. But as the Russian army had captured some key strongholds, such as Siversk, Pokrovsk and Hulyaipole, Kyiv’s new defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov (the fourth since the start of the war), declared that Ukraine’s path to victory now was to kill 50,000 Russian soldiers per month. That’s more than most estimates of Russia’s recruitment, which is believed to be around 30,000 per month.

Western politicians and analysts have embraced this theory, arguing that Russia’s unsustainable losses justify Ukraine continuing with the war with their support.

But after four years, Kyiv’s position is hampered by the loss of the full support of what was once its key ally: Washington. The Ukraine frontline is being slowly but steadily forced back and in 2025 for the first time in the war there was no major Ukrainian offensive.

Kyiv’s best hope is to freeze the conflict along the current line of contact, get security guarantees from the west, join the EU, and maintain pressure on Russia through western sanctions. Unfortunately for Ukraine, there are issues with every item on this list.

The situation at home is challenging and funding from the west is declining, thanks to the US. Meanwhile, its energy infrastructure has been severely damaged, there are ongoing issues with unpopular mobilisations, and the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has suffered a significant blow from a major corruption scandal involving his closest aides.

However, crucially, Ukraine is still fighting and its best hope now is an economic collapse in Russia. Attacks on Russia’s oil industry were intended to hasten that collapse, but Moscow’s destruction of Ukraine’s energy grid has demonstrated its greater capacity for escalation. This year will not be easy for Ukraine.

Europe’s position

Since the start of the invasion, Europe’s ideal plan for helping Ukraine win has not changed. It is believed that a combination of economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine will eventually cause Russia’s economic collapse and military defeat.

Other than this there is no European plan to end the war, except to try to prevent Trump from striking a deal which would favour Russia and gut Ukraine. For the best part of a year, the so-called coalition of the willing (Kyiv’s European allies led by France, the UK and Germany) has been talking about post-war plans with itself.

But the irony is that – despite being Ukraine’s biggest donor – coalition countries have been excluded from negotiating with Russia, whose consent to any western military deployment as a security guarantee for Kyiv will be essential.

Whatever happens, the EU will have to pay Ukraine’s bills, either to continue the war or to cover its post-war reconstruction. The EU’s promise to accept Ukraine as a member would also require increased funding over an indefinite period.

Whose side is the US on?

Under the Biden presidency, the US and Europe had the same theory of victory. However, since returning to power in January 2025, Trump has forced Europe to finance the supply of US military equipment to Ukraine. Meanwhile, it has opened negotiations with Russia to end the war.

The US push for peace remains a mystery. After all, if the Ukrainians are willing to fight and the Europeans are willing to pay for it, it is unclear why the US is so eager to end a war that is exhausting one of its geopolitical rivals in Russia.

Perhaps Trump genuinely wants to stop the killing. Or perhaps he believes that if the war is not stopped now, the eventual peace deal will be much worse for Ukraine and the west. Or maybe it’s simply a matter of stopping “Biden’s war”. A war that Trump has no interest in and that he clearly feels is hampering his plans to do business with Putin.

As with Gaza, a deal can be reached only when the parties involved in the conflict are exhausted and ready to stop fighting. In these circumstances, Trump’s mediation could succeed. For now, however, each side is still clinging to its vision of victory.

On its fourth anniversary, there is hope that this may be the last year of the war. While all sides are growing increasingly exhausted, it will be the “last mile” that matters most — who can muster the willpower and resources in the final stretch to end the war on their terms.

Alexander Titov, Lecturer in Modern European History, Queen's University Belfast

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

In an example of short-term thinking, the Liberal Party’s federal executive decided on Friday to bury its election review. But it was unable to cremate it.

On Tuesday the review was referred to at the Liberal parliamentary party’s regular meeting. No one called for its formal publication. There was no need. By then, it had been widely leaked. Later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese tabled it in parliament.

Before Christmas former leader Peter Dutton had a hissy fit about the assessment of him in the review, done by former federal minister Nick Minchin and former New South Wales minister Pru Goward. That led to some changes. The leaked version is the original version.

The picture that emerges is of an autocrat who distrusted and shut out others from their proper roles before and during the election, but who then could not deliver results.

The first of the review’s recommendations is blunt: “The Party must never again allow the Parliamentary Leader and Office to effectively run the campaign.

"The Federal Director [of the party] is the Campaign Director and must have overall responsibility for the conduct of the campaign.

"Just as you should never be your own barrister in a court of law, the Parliamentary Leader must never be his own campaign director.”

In its critique of the relationship between Dutton and party director Andrew Hirst, with its mutual complaints, the review says: “The Leader and his Chief of Staff had little trust in the Federal Director/Federal Secretariat, a breakdown which evolved over the parliamentary term, but was not effectively communicated to the Federal Director or the Federal President.

"The Federal Director irregularly attended shadow cabinet meetings, unlike past practice, and briefed the Party Room seven times during the term. Face to face meetings with the Leader were also infrequent,” the review says.

“The Federal Director observed that the Leader’s chief of staff would seek to direct campaign decision making for which he did not have responsibility.”

“The Leader’s office observed that the Party’s campaign team, headed by the Federal Director, had in the six years of Anthony Albanese’s leadership failed to develop an effective negative of Albanese.”

Although the reviewers do not reference it, the dramatic breakdown brings to mind the 1996 split between prime minister Paul Keating and Labor national secretary Gary Gray. In the 1996 campaign, Gray dubbed Keating “Captain Wacky”.

The review presents extremely depressing reading for the Liberals, not just because it finds so many faults with the party’s preparation and performance last term and in the campaign that it will be near impossible to fix them all by 2028. Even more serious, it points to underlying demographic trends working against the Liberals that have become ingrained.

“The 2025 Federal Liberal campaign failure is widely considered to be the worst campaign the Party has ever fought,” the review says.

“It was the result of an extraordinary combination of internal errors by the Parliamentary Party and the Party’s organisation, compounded by several adverse external factors,” including an interest rate cut and the flood-induced delay of the election.

Another external factor, Donald Trump’s election as US president, “soon became problematic for the Opposition Leader”, as Labor successfully identified Dutton with Trump.

The review points out: “Successful campaigns are based on a relatively straightforward rule - get the right message to the right people in the right place at the right time. The Liberal Party in 2025 comprehensively failed to follow that rule.

"There was no clear, effective message, either positive or negative. The campaign was disastrously misled in targeting and resourcing by its market research. This led to unfounded confidence that the Party could win the election.

"The overall strategy, determined by the Leader, was unclear.

"The campaign was fatally flawed by the Leader and his office taking over the overall conduct of the campaign, leaving the Party’s organisation responsible only for campaign mechanics.

"Furthermore, while Peter Dutton was never opposed or criticised openly by his parliamentary colleagues, there was widespread acknowledgement that he lacked appeal, especially to women, but his image was never successfully remade or addressed. Compounding this, the Opposition failed to frame the Prime Minister sufficiently negatively.”

Even if we assume next time there may be a better leader, without the strains between the leader’s office and the federal director, and other problems (such as flawed polling) are rectified, the Liberal Party will still be faced with two deeper, seemingly intractable problems. It has lost younger and middle aged voters, and it has been deserted by female voters. There are no obvious pathways for the party to get these cohorts back.

The review says: “The Liberal Party only won a majority of votes in the over 55 age group, 55.8% [two party preferred]. All other demographics were lost. This includes professional and managerial workers, sales, clerical and services workers, blue collar workers and those unemployed.

"Based on Crosby Textor’s post-election survey of voting provided to this review, while 46.8% of men voted Coalition (TPP), only 42.1% of women did so, representing a gender gap of 4.7% and worrying in a country where there are more female voters than male.

"It is also no longer the case among women that only professional women chose not to vote Liberal; women in all age and socio-economic demographics predominantly voted for non-Liberal parties.

"Crosby Textor post-election polling also found seats with a higher female to male voter ratio were less inclined to vote Liberal. This was more pronounced in outer metropolitan and inner regional seats. Redbridge polling confirmed the Crosby Textor results.”

“The female vote decline was referenced by many submissions. Some attributed it to the lack of female candidates in winnable seats and called for quotas. While the percentage of women candidates in winnable seats varied across the state divisions despite this, even in a state like NSW with a high number of female candidates, the swings were broadly comparable. Excellent female candidates failed to be elected.”

As Angus Taylor faced his first parliamentary week as leader, there is little evidence the Liberals are shaping effective pitches to these constituencies. The Taylor opposition, alarmed by One Nation, was focused on the issue of ISIS brides, likely to be well down the list of ordinary voters’ priorities.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Some buildings leave such an impression when you visit them that they can be forever summoned to the mind’s eye. For us, these include the soaring dome of St Paul’s cathedral in London, the Georgian grandeur of Royal Crescent in Bath, and the ascending towers and pinnacles of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge.

As psychologists with a particular focus on wellbeing, we are fascinated by the feelings these buildings instil in us – a sense of being grounded, of momentary stillness, even of awe.

But while the effects of experiencing beautiful surroundings on people’s wellbeing has been extensively researched, these studies have mainly focused on natural landscapes and settings.

We wanted to understand how people value different urban settings – and which types of building they view most positively. In England, 83 out of every 100 people now live in towns and cities, so variations in these urban landscapes can hold important consequences for wellbeing.

Our study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found a particularly powerful effect when people viewed older buildings, particularly those classified as being of special historic or architectural interest. Indeed, we found these listed buildings are comparable with forests and lakes in terms of how people rated their scenic quality.

How we tested urban scenicness

Our study combined two large datasets – the first from Scenic-Or-Not, a website where people rate the scenicness of photographs taken throughout Britain on a scale from 1 (“not scenic”) to 10 (“very scenic”). For our analysis, we used only photographs taken within English urban areas, giving us 28,547 ratings of 3,843 images.

We combined this with Historic England’s dataset of more than 370,000 listed buildings throughout England and Wales, plus their grade – I (of exceptional interest), II* (particularly important) or II (special interest) – and the century in which the building was constructed.

This enabled us to compare the ratings of views with and without listed buildings, and to explore other questions such as how the grade or century of construction influences the scenicness rating. Sometimes these buildings featured prominently in the photographs, other times only marginally – we counted them all the same.

We also used Google’s Vision AI tool to detect other features in photographs that might influence scenicness. This allowed us to rule out the possibility that photographs containing historic buildings were judged more scenic because they also tended to contain trees, for example.

In our study, the average scenicness of English urban areas was 2.43 out of 10 – significantly lower than how people rate the scenicness of natural environments. In another study that used the same platform to rate British rural scenes, these averaged 4.16.

But we also found that when a listed building was present in the photograph, this score was on average 0.61 points higher – a 25% increase. As shown in this table, this “historic building effect” was comparable to that of forests and lakes.

Impact of different features on scenicness rating:

Photographs in which the most prominent listed building was either grade I or grade II* listed were perceived more scenic than those featuring slightly less historically or architecturally significant (grade II) buildings. Images featuring buildings constructed in earlier centuries were also judged more scenic.

What makes historic buildings so valued?

The scenic quality of urban areas has previously been linked with variations in happiness and health. Our study shows old buildings in particular make important contributions to urban scenicness. This suggests that historic buildings may be worth preserving not only for their architectural significance but for their effect on people’s wellbeing.

But it also raises the question of whether the sheer age of these buildings makes them so impactful – or is it also the nature of their design?

Experts in architecture have speculated on the reasons old buildings continue to be valued so highly. For example, the apparent timeless popularity of certain historic styles, such as the symmetry of Georgian architecture in Bath’s Royal Crescent, has been contrasted with modern architecture that disregards or rejects traditional proportional guidelines.

But there are also psychological reasons why many people value historic buildings so much. These might include their reassuring sense of permanence; their weathered and imperfect nature; the stories of past lives they hold; or their ability to conjure feelings of nostalgia within us.

We hope to learn more about why people feel so strongly about historic buildings, and the effects such buildings can have on their wellbeing, in our future research. In the meantime, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Eugene Malthouse, Research Fellow, Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham and Sidney Sherborne, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, University of Warwick

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

Two of Australia’s top ten bestsellers in 2025 were cookbooks, both by Nagi Maehashi of RecipeTin Eats. Other popular books include Brooke Bellamy’s Bake with Brooki and Steph De Sousa’s Easy Dinner Queen. Yet increasingly, people are cooking from YouTube videos and other social media clips. What is the appeal of cookbooks today?

Cooking content on social media has become one of the most popular categories globally. Dedicated apps like SideChef have been created to help beginners understand technical terms in online recipes and automatically generate shopping lists.

In a 2025 study, SideChef found there were more than 4.6 million #TikTokFood posts and Pinterest listed food and drink as a top category. On YouTube, there are 6.74 million food and drink channels, which are 99% creator-driven. All-time YouTube views of food content reached 5.9 trillion in 2025.

Short-form videos provide step-by-step instruction and glamorous depictions of your next meal, but hard-copy cookbooks are more than just a collection of recipes.

Most cookbooks are technically categorised as illustrated non-fiction, filled with close-up photographs of food and images of the author in action. These illustrate the recipes, integrated with accompanying conversational text to engage the reader.

The three types of cookbook readers

Today’s cookbook audiences can be divided into three major groups: aspirational readers, everyday cooks and escapists.

The aspirational readers may want to cook like a chef, hoping the author will share secrets and include them in an inner circle of confidants. Others may aspire to a gendered ideal of domesticity, or seemingly effortless sophistication (just a little smoked duck breast and pickled fennel salad with pomegranate seeds and candied mandarin peel they threw together at the last minute).

The everyday cooks are looking to answer the dreaded question: what’s for dinner tonight? Some of these readers seek reliable, practical, frugal, and efficient solutions for the task of making food at home.

Others are seeking specialised instruction for new generations of appliances offering shortcuts or hands-off cooking, such as slow cookers, air fryers, or electric pressure cookers.

The escapists, however, are less concerned about 30-minute meals or how to reverse sear a steak. Their ideal cookbook is instead a fantasy, travelogue, or memoir, transporting the would-be cook to a nostalgic past or a far-off land, such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem.

The most extreme form of this escapism was described by US food writer Molly O'Neill as “food porn”, a substitute for actually engaging in the physical act of cooking. Stripped of the connections of community and shared meals, food porn is an extreme form of self-indulgent food writing that replaces the depth of social and cultural connections with “prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience”.

Cookbooks in this category are more like coffee-table books, meant to be perused at leisure rather than addressing an urgent need to get a meal on the table. Impractical recipes with difficult techniques, specialised equipment, and exotic ingredients are no barrier to this genre. The reality that time is also an expensive ingredient is not a consideration.

The most successful, bestselling cookbooks in Australia in recent years, like Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats: Dinner or De Sousa’s Easy Dinner Queen, combine some elements of aspirational and everyday cooking, while turning away from the extremes of food porn. Their appeal extends beyond competent instructions and dependable results.

Maehashi’s recipes start with a pitch to the reader: Why should I make this, and why should I use this recipe? How will the dish fit into my repertoire of standbys? Her unpretentious, personable tone is reassuring for anyone developing their skills. The notes to the methods include helpful tips, substitutions, and explanations, avoiding technical terms. Many recipes are easy enough for rank novices, but include a wide range of cuisines and dishes that elevate the everyday cook. Her most challenging recipe is beef wellington, now infamous for its connection to the “mushroom murders”.

As with other successful cookbook authors, Maehashi’s popularity benefits from social media crossover. She has 1.7 million Instagram followers alone.

Is there a generational divide?

While there is a presumption that younger readers are more likely to get their food inspiration online and older readers prefer hard copy, the desire to limit screen time and “be present” also drives print sales.

Physical cookbooks are an antidote to the false efficiency of recipes on social media. Influencers often ask you to follow, comment and like to get their recipes. This content often ends up unread in your inbox or in a jumbled folder of saved posts and screenshots.

Without an extra paid app, such as ReciMe, and the time to organise the content, locating that viral recipe may take longer than pulling a book off the shelf and flipping to an old favourite. Some print cookbooks, like Jerusalem, now offer access to the e-book edition, so you don’t have to lug the hard copy around the grocery store or take photos of the cookbook with your phone.

Historically, cookbook audiences were first limited by literacy levels and the cost of purchasing books. Because of this, the first cookbooks were written by, and for, an elite audience rather than skilled professionals. During the 17th century, French cuisine as a distinct mode of cooking became the standard for noble households across Europe, and cookbooks for nouvelle cuisine gained popularity. Many skilled chefs, however, were illiterate and were prohibited from sharing the methods of their guilds.

Before printing technology increased the availability of books in the early modern period, cooking and baking were reliant on oral tradition and apprenticeship to teach skills and share knowledge. Chefs working in noble households, however, were exempt from guild restrictions and revealed their trade secrets to an elite audience only.

Today’s hard-copy cookbooks bear the scars of use – tangible evidence of time and effort in the kitchen, covers stained with splatters of tomato or pages stuck together with drips of pancake batter. The dirtiest, dog-eared cookbook is the one you turn to for dependable, familiar results. This contrasts with the pristine, glossy cookbook gathering dust in the front room, filled with recipes you will never make.

Like yellowed, handwritten recipe cards from a bygone era, a physical cookbook becomes an heirloom to pass on to the next generations. Smudged with butter, dotted with red wine, and covered in annotations (too much salt!), the cookbook becomes part of family history.

The ubiquity and convenience of digital recipes, often fleeting, has not replaced the physical cookbook as a touchstone of reliability, a cultural archive, or a guilty pleasure.

Garritt C. Van Dyk, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Waikato

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

Forecasting earthquakes presents a serious challenge on land, but in the oceans that cover around 70% of the Earth’s surface it is all but impossible. However, the vast network of undersea cables that crisscross the world’s seas could soon change this. As well as transmitting data around the planet, they can also monitor the tectonic movements that cause earthquakes and tsunamis.

The “Fibre Optic Cable Use for Seafloor” project (FOCUS) has demonstrated how we can use existing fibre-optic cables to detect small movements on the seafloor caused by tectonic faults. Our aim is to improve understanding of fault activity, and therefore of possible earthquakes.

The project’s main study area was a recently mapped tectonic fault on the Mediterranean seafloor, about 30 km from Catania, Sicily. Sitting at the foot of Mount Etna, Europe’s highest and most active volcano, the fault is a “strike-slip”, a type of vertical fault in the earth’s crust that is especially prone to causing earthquakes.

The location is important. Eastern Sicily and Catania, an urban region of 1 million people, have been struck by several devastating earthquakes in recent centuries. The 1908 Messina earthquake (magnitude 7.2) and tsunami killed 72,000 people, while the 1693 Catania earthquake (estimated magnitude 7.5, the strongest in Italy’s history) killed about 60,000 people and destroyed most of the large buildings in Catania.

Catania is also home to a nuclear physics institute, the INFN-LNS, which runs an offshore research station consisting of a cabled seafloor observatory. Originally designed as a test site for for the institute’s neutrino telescope located 100km away, the southern branch of this 29km-long electro-optical cable ends just 2.5km from the recently mapped “strike-slip” fault on the seabed.

The FOCUS project worked by deploying a specially designed strain cable across the newly mapped fault in hopes of detecting tectonic movement. Any movement, however small, would tug on the cable and elongate the optical fibres inside. This can be detected by analysing laser light fired into the optical fibres.

Seabed cables

In October 2020, my team and I conducted our first marine expedition at the INFN-LNS site near Sicily, with the French Research vessel PourquoiPas?.

First, we connected our specially designed 6km-long strain cable (similar to submarine telecommunication cables but with special sensor fibers) to the seafloor observatory. Using an underwater plough, this cable was then buried about 20 cm below the seafloor, crossing the fault in four different locations about 1km apart.

A set of 8 acoustic beacons was also set in place, 4 on each side of the fault. This was to independently measure any possible fault movement – any change in the baselines between the beacons would confirm there had been movement.

Laser light was then fired at regular 2 hour intervals through the research site’s 29km-long electro-optical cable and into the FOCUS strain cable, which included a triple loop in the fibres, allowing the light to go back and forth three times for a total optical path length of 47km.

The laser used a technique known as BOTDR (Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometry). This has been used for decades to monitor deformation of large engineering infrastructures like bridges, dams and pipelines.

False alarms show the system works

A natural disturbance in the FOCUS fibre-optic cable was detected about 1 month later, in November 2020, representing an elongation of about 1.5 cm at the first fault crossing. At first it seemed the fault might have moved, but the acoustic beacons showed no change.

The most likely cause of the cable disturbance was a submarine landslide, akin to an avalanche of sediment at the bottom of the sea.

A second disturbance of the cable occurred in September 2021, but in this case we definitely know the cause. I led an operation that used an unmanned submarine to place weight bags on portions of the cable that were not well buried and lying on the seafloor, or spanning uneven terrain.

Nearly 100 weight bags (weighing 25kg each) were placed on top of the cable in 4 places, pushing the cable down into the soft mud and elongating the fibres inside. The special tight fibres in the FOCUS cable were more sensitive than the standard loose fibres used by the telecom industry, and showed very strong signals.

While these two readings did not show tectonic movement, they clearly demonstrated that undersea cables can help us closely monitor the seabed.

Commercial cables

A secondary study area for the FOCUS project was a network of commercial telecommunication cables connecting the islands of the Guadeloupe archipelago. Over the three-year period between 2022 and 2024 I, along with partners at IDIL fibre optics, conducted a series of BOTDR measurements at 3-6 month intervals from roadside junction boxes.

We observed seasonal shifts in BOTDR signals in the shallow-water portions of the cable (typically at depths of 10-100m), likely from temperature variations on the seabed. To confirm this, we compared the temperature shifts based on our cable readings to independent satellite data. They were accurate to within about 0.1°C.

We also observed strong mechanical strain in the telecom cables at specific geographic locations such as shelf breaks, submarine canyons and narrow straits between islands exposed to storms and strong currents.

The results from our Guadeloupe study confirmed the accuracy and sensitivity of readings from commercial cables, as opposed to the more specialised cables used at the Catania site. They underscored their potential use for detecting mechanical disturbances to the cable (natural or man-made) and for performing long-term environmental monitoring.

Together, these results offer great promise for transforming much of the world’s vast network of submarine telecom cables into seismological and environmental sensors, to help better monitor earthquake hazard and climate change.

This article is the result of The Conversation’s collaboration with Horizon, the EU research and innovation magazine. In November 2025, the magazine published an interview with the author.

Marc-Andre Gutscher, Directeur de Recherche CNRS, géophysique marine, Université de Bretagne occidentale

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

Some of the universe’s most extreme explosions leave behind almost no trace. The original explosion is unseen, but our observations can capture the long-lived echo it leaves behind as the shock front ploughs into its surrounding environment.

In new research accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, we have discovered what may be the clearest example yet of one of these hidden explosions: the radio afterglow of a powerful gamma-ray burst whose initial blast went unnoticed.

The only other viable explanation for what we see is an extraordinarily rare event in which a star is torn apart by an intermediate-mass black hole: a long-hypothesised, elusive class of black holes that has proven difficult to detect.

Either way, we’re watching the slow-motion aftermath of one of the most extreme, rare events the cosmos can produce.

The explosions we usually miss

Gamma-ray bursts are brief but powerful jets of high-energy radiation. Within seconds, they release as much energy as the Sun will emit over its entire lifetime. They are caused when massive stars die and form black holes.

While these jets are launched in all directions, we only observe the small fraction whose emission is directed towards us. When it is directed away from us, the initial flash goes unseen, and all we can observe is the slowly fading afterglow.

Although these so-called “orphan afterglows” of gamma-ray bursts have been predicted for decades, finding them has proven extraordinarily difficult. Without a high-energy flash to announce their arrival, astronomers have to search thousands of square degrees of sky.

As a result, these cosmic explosions are easy to miss, and hard to recognise when they do appear – until now.

A cosmic ghost appears

Using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), a 36-antenna radio telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara in Western Australia, we scanned vast regions of sky for unexpected long-lived radio transients (astronomical objects that appear and change over weeks to years). We were trying to catch rare events that reveal themselves only through their fading radio emission.

In data from one of these wide-field surveys, we noticed a radio source (named ASKAP J005512-255834), that hadn’t been there before.

It brightened rapidly, releasing 10³² Watts of energy into space – comparable to the total radio energy output of billions of Suns – and then began to fade slowly over time.

This behaviour immediately set it apart. Most radio transients either evolve quickly or flare repeatedly. This source did neither. Instead, it behaved like the lingering echo of a single, immensely powerful explosion.

Although ASKAP J005512-255834 was bright at radio wavelengths, it left almost no signal at other wavelengths. We could not see a counterpart in visible light or X-rays.

This is exactly what astronomers expect from an orphan afterglow: the fading, widening glow of a tightly focused cosmic jet that was not initially pointed towards Earth, becoming visible only after it slows and spreads.

A busy neighbourhood, billions of light-years away

This rare transient is located in a small but bright galaxy around 1.7 billion light-years from Earth. The galaxy has an irregular structure and is actively forming stars, making it a natural environment for extreme stellar events such as stellar collapse or violent stellar disruption.

The position of the explosion is off to one side, not aligned with the galaxy’s central nucleus. Instead, it appears to lie within a compact star-forming region, possibly a nuclear star cluster.

This raises new questions about what kinds of environments can host such powerful cosmic events.

Could it be something else?

Because ASKAP J005512-255834 is so unusual, we had to do some detective work to figure out what it might be. We carefully examined (and ruled out) some alternative explanations, including stars, pulsars and supernovae.

The only other scenario capable of reproducing the observed radio behaviour involves a star being torn apart by an intermediate-mass black hole. These are a rare class of black holes that sit between stellar remnants and the supermassive giants found in galaxy centres.

Such events are thought to be extremely rare at radio wavelengths, but we cannot completely rule out this explanation. Confirming it would make this the first example of its kind, a discovery just as interesting as an orphan gamma-ray burst.

A hidden universe revealed by radio waves

Was this discovery a stroke of luck, or the first glimpse of a long-hidden population? Until recently, we simply didn’t have the tools to know.

ASKAP J005512-255834 is the most convincing orphan gamma-ray burst afterglow yet identified. It was found by using our radio telescope to search for the long-lived echo of an explosion we didn’t know had occurred.

Using the same approach, we now hope to uncover many more of these orphan afterglows and finally give them a place in our cosmic story.

In doing so, we may be able to build a full picture of the gamma-ray burst population, including those that never announced themselves with a flash, but lingered quietly as ghosts in the radio sky.

Ashna Gulati, PhD Candidate, Radio Astronomy, University of Sydney and Tara Murphy, Professor, Radio Astronomy, University of Sydney

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

When you look up at the night sky, it appears unchanging. But if you look deep enough you will find that the sky is in fact constantly shifting. Satellites, asteroids and interstellar objects pass by. Stars not only shine brightly, they can suddenly burst with energy or explode in bright supernovae.

There is a plethora of explosive and cataclysmic phenomena waiting to be witnessed. For physicists, this is an opportunity to study our universe and physics that we can’t reproduce on Earth.

A whole new era of discovery is opening with the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. For the next ten years, Rubin will create a high-definition video of the southern sky, revealing our universe in an unprecedented way. Many of the objects it finds will have never before been seen by human eyes.

More than 20 years in the making

This moment has been more than 20 years in the making, from the concept to completion of the Rubin Observatory.

Located on a dark sky mountaintop in Chile, the observatory represents a generational leap in astronomy with its ultra-wide, deep and high-resolution imaging capabilities.

Rubin has the largest camera ever built, with 3,200 megapixels. Each image scans an area equivalent to 40 full moons. The resolution of the images is so high that if we pointed the camera toward a lime located 24 kilometres away, it would be able to resolve exactly what type of fruit it is.

Last year, Rubin amazed us with its first test images. These images revealed a swarm of new asteroids never before detected, stars varying in our Milky Way and beautiful deep images of galaxies. This is just a taster on what is to come; this week Rubin started publicly sharing hundreds of thousands changing sky objects per night.

The telescope will be uniquely used for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. This ten-year-long survey aims to solve the biggest mysteries of the universe – and the nature of the physics out there.

20 billion galaxies

With its advanced imaging capabilities and its systematic scan of the sky, Rubin will image an incredible number of objects in our universe over the next decade.

Starting in our cosmic backyard, our Solar System, it will make 6 million detections of asteroids. Moving toward our galaxy, it will catalogue 17 billion stars. Farther away, it will gather colour images of 20 billion galaxies.

The same patch of the sky will be imaged up to 100 times each year. With an expected 10 terrabytes of image data per night, the amount of data Rubin will deliver in a single year will be greater than all optical observatories combined.

With this data, we aim to answer fundamental questions. These include the nature of the most mysterious components of our universe: dark matter and dark energy.

I am particularly interested in using the data to measure whether the universe expansion maintains a constant acceleration or changes with cosmic time. This accelerated cosmic expansion is attributed to dark energy, which comprises 70% of our universe. Yet we still don’t know what it is.

By itself, this measurement would be amazing, especially since recent observations have hinted the expansion rate may be changing. From the physics point of view, this will allow us to narrow down which potential theories can explain dark energy.

A firehose of cosmic treasures

To find changing sky objects, we compare a new image to an “old” or reference image. The difference between the two images can reveal a new object or a change of brightness.

So how do we find the most interesting exploding stars or asteroids within this mass of detections?

Rubin has selected seven “community brokers”. A broker is both the infrastructure and the team that receives this data firehose within minutes of detection, processes it to find the most exciting objects, and makes them publicly available.

One of these community brokers is Fink, which I have the privilege of co-leading.

Fink is made up of hundreds of scientists and engineers around the world working together to understand our universe. With the incredible Rubin data, comes a great opportunity but also a big challenge.

We need state-of-the-art technologies such as distributed computing (a network of computers, similar to commercial cloud services) and artificial intelligence tools to process the data very fast. We are talking about analysing thousands of detections from Rubin every minute or two, and up to 10 million every night for ten years.

Become a Rubin citizen scientist

You can also engage with Rubin right now.

Rubin’s first images are available online and you can use apps such as Orbitviewer to track asteroids, as well as look at deep images with SkyViewer.

You can also become a Rubin citizen scientist. For example, you can help to identify changing objects in our universe with Rubin Difference Detectives and find comets with Rubin Comet Catchers.

The data from community brokers is also publicly available. Through our Fink portal, you will be able to inspect the latest detections from Rubin just minutes after an image has been taken.

The data may not look like the stunning Rubin first light images. But they come directly from the telescope and are full of universe treasures.

Correction: this article originally stated the Legacy Survey of Space and Time has started. It has been amended to make clear the survey has not yet started but that the Rubin Observatory has started publicly sharing data.

Anais Möller, Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow, School of Science, Computing and Emerging Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology

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

The “frugal chic” aesthetic is having its moment, however contradictory the concept may seem. “Frugal” suggests a focus on thriftiness, while “chic” oozes a sense of classic luxury.

Coined by former model and content creator Mia McGrath before trending on TikTok, this is one of the latest attempts to change how we think about clothes and disrupt our voracious appetite for fashion.

McGrath encourages Gen Z to think about the positive aspects of making do with less. For her, being frugally chic refers to:

An individual who values quality, high taste, and freedom. They reject this new world of overconsumption that preys on the insecurities of unconscious doom scrollers.

Frugal chic means a commitment to purchases that will last for many years and be part of a “forever wardrobe”.

McGrath calls on consumers to invest in quality – “buy it nice or buy it twice” – while blending luxury purchases with cheaper and even thrifted clothes.

Slow fashion, repair cafes and capsule wardrobes

McGrath is not the first to try to influence change by promoting sustainable, responsible clothing consumption.

The global slow fashion movement supports individuals to (as the name suggests) slow down clothing purchases. But simply shopping less is easier said than done.

Slow fashion is driven by an increased awareness of the environmental and societal impact of the purchases we make. It also means forming a different, deeper relationship with our clothes.

Repair cafes set up in many countries (including Australia) further aid this work. They offer opportunities for people to fix their clothes – whether broken zips, missing buttons, rips, or something more complex – with the help of skilled repairers.

An uptick in “capsule wardrobes” has also been framed as a responsible choice. A capsule wardrobe encourages fewer classic, high-quality items in neutral colours as staples that can be worn interchangeably with each other and with bolder accent pieces.

Each of these matters as a counterpoint to what has become a massive problem: Australia’s spiralling consumption and discard rates.

Our passion for fashion

In 2024, Australians purchased 1.51 billion items of new clothing. That’s the equivalent of 55 garments for every person each year.

Many of those clothes don’t form part of a “forever wardrobe”. Across that same year, Australians sent 220,000 tonnes of castoffs to landfills. That’s 880 million items. A further 36 million items of unwanted clothing were shipped overseas, adding to mounting global landfills.

The production, consumption, use and disposal of clothing are emission-intensive. In 2024, Australia’s per capita emissions for clothing were equivalent to driving more than 3,600 kilometres in a petrol-fuelled car. That’s further than a road trip from Melbourne to Perth.

Despite these startling figures, our shopping continues.

Restrictions and austerity

Frugal chic has plenty of historical parallels. Though the contexts differ, these moments encouraged Australians to make do with the little they had.

More than 150 years ago, as a flood of gold-rush migrants descended on Australia, many had only a few changes of clothes – as many as could be counted on one hand. This was considered sufficient.

Clothing did not have a single life. It could be mended, adjusted and adapted. It could be passed down from person to person. Clothing was so valuable it was often bequeathed.

At the end of its wearable life, clothing was recycled into something new. It might be cut down to fit children, pieced together and sewn into quilts and waggas (quilts made out of recycled clothes, fabric scraps, old blankets and burlap bags) for warmth at night, or torn into rags.

This considered attitude to clothing did not end in the 20th century. Global upheavals continued to underline the critical importance of long clothing lifecycles.

In the Great Depression, as rates of unemployment soared, clothing budgets plummeted. This demanded ingenuity to keep families clothed.

Austerity measures introduced in Australia during World War II included the rationing of clothing. Measures also included the control of clothing styles to save fabric, threads and buttons. Known as “victory styling”, this created a direct link between less clothing and contributing to the war effort.

Some responded by making new clothes out of old garments salvaged from the back of wardrobes. Others turned to novel materials such as sugar bags to make themselves new outfits.

Reframing restraint

Like these historical examples, the “frugal chic” aesthetic frames frugality as virtuous – aligning with the shift towards sustainability – and aspirational, signalling an intention to live more mindfully.

In today’s context, it’s also inextricably linked to the cost-of-living crisis that has encouraged a rise in secondhand clothing and dress hire.

But “frugal chic” is not without tension. For one thing, most “frugal chic” content casts frugality as a choice rather than a necessity for dealing with issues of overconsumption or low income.

For another, it could be seen as an example of the pressure placed on women to look and act in certain ways – not simply to prioritise sustainability, but to appear both fashionable and financially savvy at the same time.

Will the “frugal chic” aesthetic change how we think about our clothes? It’s hard to say, but all rallying cries for sustainable fashion consumption hold potential for much-needed change.

Lorinda Cramer, Lecturer, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University

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

Most people know about car safety ratings and many take them seriously when choosing a new car.

In Australia and New Zealand, safety ratings are issued by the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), a non-regulatory, not-for-profit organisation that tests new vehicles and publishes results.

ANCAP has announced significant changes from 2026.

Here’s how the ratings have traditionally been determined, what is changing and what it all means for safety on our roads.

How car safety rating works

A majority of Australians say they wouldn’t buy a car that hasn’t achieved a five-star rating.

Manufacturers know this too. Those stars influence which features companies prioritise and what specifications they supply to different markets.

Yet unless you closely follow the car industry, you may not know much about what is actually tested.

ANCAP assigns vehicles a safety rating from zero to five stars based on a mix of crash tests, assessments of on-board safety features and the safety technologies built into the car.

Its rating system has evolved over time. Under the framework introduced in recent years, vehicles are assessed across four key pillars.

1. Adult occupant protection. This looks at how well the car structure protects the driver and passengers in the most common crashes, assessed using crash-test dummies equipped with sensors. These tests include frontal (head-on) and side impacts, pole crashes, whiplash protection and how easy it is for emergency services to access occupants after a crash.

2. Child occupant protection. This examines how well children are protected in front and side crashes, and how built-in safety features such as seatbelts and restraint systems support them.

3. Vulnerable road user protection. This considers the risk the vehicle poses to pedestrians and cyclists, and includes tests of head and leg impact on the bonnet and bumper, as well as the car’s emergency braking system.

4. Safety assist. This focuses on crash-avoidance technology such as speed-assistance systems, lane support and autonomous emergency braking.

Vehicles receive a score for each pillar as well as an overall star rating.

To reach a given star level, cars must meet minimum thresholds across all pillars. This means the overall rating is limited by the weakest area.

Buyers’ considerations

It’s worth remembering that a safety score reflects the standards in place at the time of testing.

Rating requirements are updated every three years to encourage the inclusion of newer safety features and technologies in vehicles entering the Australian and New Zealand markets.

Buyers should check when a car was tested and which model was assessed.

It’s also important to consider the number of stars is an abstract rating – it doesn’t mean all five-star cars perform equally well in every area. Some may offer stronger crash protection, while others may be better at avoiding collisions or protecting pedestrians.

For anyone choosing between several top-rated vehicles, the detailed pillar scores can therefore be more informative than the stars alone.

How the ratings are changing

ANCAP has announced significant changes to its rating system.

Instead of the current four pillars, ANCAP will organise its assessments under a “Stages of Safety” framework (a reference to pre-, during and post-crash phases): safe driving, crash avoidance, crash protection and post-crash.

Crash testing remains part of the system but it becomes just one stage rather than the central construct.

The new approach places greater emphasis on features that help prevent crashes in the first place. This includes driver-monitoring technology and how reliably these systems work in real-world conditions – for example whether emergency braking can still detect pedestrians at night or in poor weather.

It also expands its assessment of safety features inside the vehicle by analysing issues such as whether key controls are accessible without using touchscreen menus.

More weight is also given to what happens after a crash. This includes whether electric door handles remain operable, if high-voltage batteries in electric vehicles are safely isolated and whether the vehicle can automatically notify emergency services with crash data through systems such as eCall.

What does all that mean?

While ANCAP is not a regulator, its ratings strongly influence what manufacturers supply to Australia and NZ and which cars buyers choose, meaning its priorities can shape real-world safety outcomes.

The new changes are broadly a positive step.

The main risk is, in broadening the existing framework, some areas may become less important.

Vulnerable road user protection was previously a distinct pillar and there is a chance its prominence could be diluted within a more complex system.

This matters because markets where safety ratings do not heavily emphasise vulnerable user protection – such as the United States – tend to have weaker incentives for manufacturers to prioritise it.

That’s partly why pedestrian safety outcomes are so vastly different between the US and other Western countries.

In recent years, the pedestrian death rate in Australia has risen despite improved car occupant safety. So, it’s important our rating systems do not lose emphasis on the risks outside the vehicle.

This is especially relevant as newer vehicles are becoming larger and taller – design features associated with higher injury risk for pedestrians and cyclists.

If safety ratings do not continue to highlight this clearly and prominently, buyers are less likely to notice it, its weight in the overall score will also decline, and manufacturers will naturally have less incentive to address it in vehicle design.

While greater emphasis on crash avoidance is welcome, crashes involving vulnerable road users will still occur. Protection should therefore continue to be clearly visible in ratings and a key criterion.

One alternative approach might have been to retain the existing pillars and build on them – for example by adding a fifth pillar, or expanding the current framework to include “safe driving” while integrating other new elements into the existing categories.

Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne

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

When a 5-inch-by-4-inch red chalk drawing of a woman’s foot by Michelangelo sold at auction for US$27.2 million on Feb. 5, 2026, it blew past the $1.5 million to $2 million it was expected to receive.

Experts believe it to be a study for the figure of the Libyan Sibyl, a female prophet who appears on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo painted the iconic frescoes from 1508 to 1512, but he first sketched out the overall composition and details in a series of preparatory drawings. Only around 50 of these drawings survive today.

This was an exciting sale for reasons outside that eye-popping sum. Held in private collections for centuries, the drawing only came to light after the owner sent an unsolicited photo to Christie’s auction house. There, a drawings expert recognized it as one of the relatively few remaining studies for the Sistine frescoes.

As an art historian who specializes in the Italian Renaissance, I’m excited about the sale not because of the money it fetched, but because of the attention it has brought to Michelangelo’s lifelong devotion to drawing, a medium he prized over painting.

‘Not my art’

Art historians know a lot about Michelangelo through the letters and poems he penned, along with two biographies written in his lifetime by intimates Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi.

In 1506, Pope Julius II put Michelangelo’s sculpting work on a papal tomb at St. Peter’s Basilica on hold, redirecting the funds intended for the tomb to the renovation of the basilica itself.

Michelangelo responded by closing his studio. He ordered his workshop assistants to sell off its contents, abandoned 90 wagonloads’ worth of marble and left Rome in disgust.

In 1508, Julius and his intermediary, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi, were able to lure Michelangelo back to Rome with the promise of a 500-ducat payment and a contract to paint the Sistine. Despite accepting, the artist went on to complain relentlessly about his new commission. He wrote to his father that painting “is not my profession” and told the pope that painting “is not my art.”

Sculpture, not painting, was central to Michelangelo’s identity.

In the Condivi biography, which Michelangelo approved and helped shape, the artist is said to have abandoned painter Domenico Ghirlandaio’s workshop around 1490 to train in the Florence sculpture garden of powerful arts patron Lorenzo de’ Medici. Michelangelo would later joke that he became a sculptor as an infant, thanks to the breast milk of his wet nurse, who was the daughter of stonemasons.

Beyond his enthusiastic embrace of sculpture and resentment over the Sistine – what he called the “tragedy of the tomb” – Michelangelo found painting in fresco to be backbreaking work.

“I’ve grown a goiter from this torture,” he wrote to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia in an illustrated poem. “My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!”

“My painting is dead,” he concludes. “I am not in the right place – I am not a painter.”

A grand design

The caricature that accompanies Michelangelo’s poem shows not only a cantankerous and restless mind, but also his use of drawing to reflect its inner workings.

The early 16th century witnessed a rise of drawing, with Michelangelo leading the way. Rather than simply copying or providing models for painting, drawing became understood as an important intellectual, exploratory and creative exercise

Michelangelo’s biographer Vasari famously used the term “disegno” to mean both a physical drawing and a work’s overall “design” or concept, giving the artist an almost godlike creative power.

This double meaning is reflected in the title of the hugely popular 2017 exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York": “Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer.”

Michelangelo created many drawings for the Sistine that reflected the different meanings of “disegno.” There were his sketches of models, along with his architectural renderings and schemes to organize the huge space. Then there were the full-size “cartoons” he drew to transfer his designs directly onto the ceiling itself.

The good foot

Michelangelo also made many studies of individual body parts and gestures for the Sistine, including eyes, hands and feet.

In a drawing for the Sistine ceiling that’s now in the British Museum, various hands – perhaps modeled after his own – repeat across the right side of the page. Feet were especially important to the overall design of the human figure, and they stand at the intersection of Michelangelo’s interests in Classical art and human anatomy.

Contrapposto, or the Classical “counter-poise,” was the iconic stance for standing figures in paintings and sculptures. It features the trunk of the body centered over one leg with its foot planted, and the other bent with the foot perched on the toe. Michelangelo’s “David” stands in contrapposto, and even doctors today are impressed by the anatomical precision of the muscles and veins of each foot.

The Christie’s red chalk drawing of the foot was likely done from a live model, with Michelangelo showing the elegance of the Libyan Sibyl prophetess through her dramatically arched foot.

In the finished fresco, Sibyl’s body is a kind of elegant machine. The musculature of her extended arms, her coiled torso and her pointed toe all work in concert. This small drawing shows how the charged energy of a single body part could contribute to the overall “disegno” of the massive fresco.

While the process of painting the ceiling was arduous, the process of conceiving it through drawing was obviously rewarding for Michelangelo.

Drawing as the linchpin

Despite the popularity of the Sistine frescoes, Michelangelo rarely returned to painting after completing them. In 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned him to paint the “The Last Judgment” on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. But only after Clement died later that year – and Clement’s successor, Pope Paul III, gave Michelangelo the extraordinary title of Chief Architect, Sculptor, and Painter to the Vatican Palace – did the artist begin work on the altar wall.

While many people today may think of the Sistine frescoes or Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” when they think of the Italian Renaissance, those artists did not think of themselves primarily as painters.

In a famous letter of introduction to the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo elaborates on his many skills in creating fortifications, infrastructure and weaponry. He boasts about his ability to build bridges, canals, tunnels and catapults. Only after 10 paragraphs does he include a single sentence admitting that he, in addition, “can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and in painting can do any kind of work as well as any man.”

Like Michelangelo’s, Leonardo’s drawings show a voracious mind at work. They explore, rather than simply observe, everything from military machines to human anatomy. In 1563, Michelangelo would go on to be named master of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, which aimed to teach drawing and design as the underlying skills necessary for sculpture, architecture and painting.

Drawing, it turns out, was the art that unified the many pursuits of the “Renaissance Man.”

Anna Swartwood House, Associate Professor of Art History, University of South Carolina

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

The Kimberley region in the north-west corner of Western Australia is full of rugged ranges and gorges, and long stretches of red soil and rocky ground. The dry seasons are long, and the wet seasons often flood the Martuwarra Fitzroy River – an artery to the Indian Ocean – in the region’s south.

But if you were to travel back to the Early Triassic period, 250 million years ago, you would see a very different landscape. Back then, the land was covered in brackish water and was more like a mudflat, on the shore of a shallow bay.

Inhabiting this area were creatures a far stretch from the dingoes, rock wallabies and livestock that populate the region today. Strange amphibians, called temnospondyls, which looked like a cross between a salamander and a crocodile, dominated this era, feeding on fish and other small animals.

A new study colleagues and I have just published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology sheds new light on these animals. It shows for the first time how they were able to become an evolutionary success story.

Lost – then found

Palaeontologists uncovered fossils of these weird animals in rocks (known as the Blina shale) on Noonkanbah station, roughly 250 kilometres inland of Broome, during field expeditions in the 1960s.

Temnospondyls are an incredibly long and diverse lineage of vertebrates. Their fossil record extends some 210 million years, from the Carboniferous period through to the Cretaceous. They include prehistoric animals such as Eryops and Koolasuchus. Their story is one of great survival – one of the few vertebrate groups that persisted through the two mass extinctions at the end of the Permian and Triassic periods.

The temnospondyl discovered on Noonkanbah station was called Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis. It was named in 1972 by Cosgriff and Garbutt based on three fossil skull pieces that were retrieved on those field expeditions in the 1960s.

The specimens were sent to several museum collections in Australia and the United States. And some time in the following 50 years or so, they were lost.

Luckily, the Western Australian Museum retained a high quality plaster cast of one of the pieces. But our team was determined to find out more about these enigmatic fossils. We were completely blown away when one of the lost pieces turned up in a museum collection at Berkeley, in the US.

One species becomes two

Once we could look at these two pieces of Erythrobatrachus, we could see that they actually belonged to two different species of temnospondyl.

One of the original fossils was definitely unique enough to maintain the Erythrobatrachus name. The other one was more like a previously described, and well-known temnospondyl called Aphaneramma.

While both animals would have been roughly the same size (with skulls of about 40 centimetres long when complete), the shape of their skulls indicated different diets and hunting strategies.

Erythrobatrachus had a broader, more robust head and would have been a top predator in its environment.

Aphaneramma, on the other hand, had a long, thin snout probably adapted for catching small fish. They both lived in the same habitat, coexisting by hunting different prey.

A global spread

Modern amphibians are extremely sensitive to salt levels in water. This is why marine environments which have high salinity are generally not a place where amphibians like to live.

Temnospondyls of the family Trematosauria, to which both Erythrobatrachus and Aphaneramma belong, were apparently unbothered by salt water, as trematosaurid fossils are found in marine deposits around the world.

In fact, fossils of Aphaneramma have been found in localities of similar age to the Blina Shale – in Svalbard, Russia, Pakistan and Madagascar.

Trematosaurs are particularly notable as their fossils are found in rocks which date less than 1 million years after the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian period, also known as the Great Dying. This was the most catastrophic mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Confirmation that Aphaneramma’s range also included Australia shows these animals were dispersing worldwide during the earliest parts of the Mesozoic era.

Our research adds an exclamation point to just how adaptable temnospondyls were. They had an amazing ability to utilise a plethora of ecological niches to survive, even in the face of extreme global change – proving they were definitely one of evolution’s success stories.

Lachlan Hart, Lecturer, School of Education, UNSW Sydney

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

It’s nighttime and you’re exhausted. But the hotel bed feels wrong. The mini fridge won’t stop making that low, irritating hum. The power outlet lights feel brighter than the sun. Outside, random car honks and noises make sleep feel like a distant possibility.

Many of us struggle to sleep in new environments, even when we’re physically tired. But why? The short answer: a mix of biology and psychology.

Broken routines and missing sleep cues

Your brain is wired for predictability, especially at night, during our most vulnerable behaviour: sleep.

A combination of internal and external cues work together to create the right conditions for rest.

Internally, your body signals that it’s time to sleep by decreasing core body temperature and increasing the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin. This makes you less alert.

Externally, your environment needs to support these signals, not compete with it. At home, your typical pre-sleep wind-down habits and familiar surroundings tell your body it is safe to sleep.

But sleeping somewhere new often disrupts these sights, sounds and sensations your body relies on.

There may be different light levels (for example, from hotel room clocks or street lights), unfamiliar noises (such as elevators, traffic and neighbours) and different bedding (for instance, a firmer mattress or softer pillows).

And you may be doing different activities, such as eating out late or working on a laptop on your bed.

An alert brain in a new place

From an evolutionary perspective, lighter sleep or more frequent awakenings when we’re somewhere new may be protective, allowing us to detect potential threats more quickly and respond to danger.

This is known as the “first-night effect”. It means when we sleep somewhere new, our brains don’t fully switch off.

Brain activity recordings have shown that during the first night in a new environment, the left side of the brain remains more responsive to unfamiliar sounds, even during deep sleep, compared to the second night. Once we become familiar with the space, this vigilance usually fades.

But even when we start to get used to a new environment, other factors can still interfere with our sleep.

Stress, travel and emotions

Sleeping in a new environment can also be stressful.

Your brain may be running through logistics and to-do lists, thinking about your early flight, or scenarios where you forget important belongings. Maybe you’re also experiencing jet lag.

Emotions such as homesickness, excitement, anticipation or anxiety can disrupt sleep as well. Even positive stress – for example, feeling excited about a big trip – activates the same arousal systems in the brain as negative stress. The brain doesn’t distinguish why those systems are switched on.

Unfortunately, a heightened arousal system and sleep are competitors. When your stress response is active, it directly interferes with the brain’s ability to disengage and transition into sleep, even when you’re physically exhausted.

But some people actually sleep better away from home

For some of us, being away from home can actually remove everyday distractions: there are no household responsibilities, no unfinished tasks competing for attention, and clearer boundaries between “work time” and “rest time”.

The change of environment may also reduce bedtime rumination, which is often triggered by familiar home environments tied to stress, deadlines or to-do lists.

Better sleep when we are away may be to do with the amount of sleep we usually get at home. Research shows that individuals who are not getting enough sleep at home are likely to get better sleep when travelling.

If your sleep improves when you’re away, it might be an opportunity to consider how stimulating or busy your usual sleep environment has become – and what you can do to make it calmer.

Tips for sweet dreams at home or away

Reassure yourself. If you have a rough night of sleep in a new place it doesn’t mean something is “wrong” with you. It’s a normal, protective response from a brain that’s tuned to safety and familiarity. You might need a night or two to settle in.

Choose sleep-friendly accommodation when you can. Many hotels are deliberately designed to support good sleep and these features, such as pillow menus, melatonin-rich foods on the room-service menu, or even a personal sleep butler, can make a real difference.

Plan for a slower first day. If you know you’re sleeping somewhere new, expect that the first night might not be your best. Where possible, avoid scheduling demanding tasks the next morning and give yourself time to adjust.

Pack your sleep routine in your suitcase. Just as parents might do for their small child, pack your sleep routine with you. If you have a particular pillow case or a sleep mask, or a certain scent that helps you sleep at home, try bringing these with you so your brain has some familiar cues in an unfamiliar environment.

If you notice you sleep better away from home, take a look at your home sleep routine and environment. Keep your room cool and dark and make your bed comfortable with supportive pillows and fresh bedding. Establish a relaxing wind-down routine: dim lights and limit screens in the evening, and stick to consistent bed and wake times, even on weekends.

Charlotte Gupta, Sleep Researcher, Appleton Institute, HealthWise Research Group, CQUniversity Australia and Dayna Easton, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University

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