Pittwater Online News

As Year 12 students pass the halfway point of their final year, the question of “what next?” can start to loom large. Some students have a clear plan: a course they want to get into, a trade they want to start, or a gap year they are saving for.

But many find the question daunting, because the answer is, “I have no idea”.

If this is you, the first thing you need to hear is – not knowing is very normal. The second thing is – you do not need to know or decide your final destination now (or even soon).

Right now, you are being asked to make huge life decisions when you are still learning what you enjoy, what you are good at, the type of people you hope to work with, and what kind of life you want to build.

It is not realistic to think you will know all the answers to these questions at 17 or 18. These answers are supposed to reveal themselves over time, and they will.

Our research points to some strategies that may prove useful in moving forward, even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going yet.

Is my passion important?

One common approach you’ve probably tried is to ask yourself: what am I passionate about?

Personal interest can be a good starting point, but research suggests it’s not the whole picture.

All jobs have good and bad parts, and all futures have ups and downs. So the aim is not to expect constant enjoyment or getting everything you want. It’s to choose a next step that gives you a good chance of building toward a life that is meaningful, energising and right for you.

Our research finds this kind of life tends to emerge when three basic psychological needs are supported. These are:

1. autonomy – feeling like you’re in the driver’s seat of your life

2. competence – feeling like you can build skills and accomplish what needs to be done

3. relatedness – feeling connected to and valued by people you care about.

Everyone experiences the satisfaction of these needs differently, so you need to gather evidence about what satisfies yours.

What makes you feel capable and in control?

So, the task is not to find your passion. The task is to create good evidence about yourself.

Instead of asking “what job title do I want forever?”, ask:

• what kinds of tasks make me feel more capable after I do them?

• when do I feel curious rather than just compliant?

• what environments make me shut down or tune out?

• what kind of people do I want around me all day?

These questions matter because they will point you towards the kinds of experiences you want to have every day. Hopefully, this gives you a practical way to think about next year and a way to talk to people about it too.

Parents, teachers, career advisers, family friends, older students, and people working in fields you’re curious about are all a good start.

But remember, you need to feel in charge of your life. Bring them in on your evidence gathering rather than asking them to decide for you. Saying something like, “I’m open to advice. But I need support to do my own thinking,” might help.

As your time allows, try new things and be open. This might involve taking a class, getting a casual job, volunteering or joining a team. Pay attention to what leaves you feeling more skilled, connected and in control.

It’s OK not to know

My own career trajectory has been far from linear. I had many (many!) jobs across three full-time careers before I discovered my current career in academic research satisfies my needs. All the dots connected in the end, none of my previous experience was wasted.

I use myself as an example to show how the next step will not make or break your whole life.

So choose a next step that is realistic, builds skills, and is most likely to support those basic psychological needs.

The form of that choice matters less than whether it gives you room to grow, build confidence, meet people, and gather better information about yourself.

Emma Bradshaw, Research Fellow, Motivation and Behaviour, Australian Catholic University

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

Images of the sleek keels, elegant planks, and dragon-headed prows of Viking longships have been reproduced countless times on postcards, book covers, souvenirs and in television shows and movies.

These vessels are, quite literally, the poster-ships for the Viking Age, which was between around 750 and 1100 CE.

So what made these ships so special? And why were these advanced shipbuilding techniques so crucial to the Vikings’ success?

What drove this shipbuilding boom?

In Old Norse, there are two words for Viking: víkingr refers to a person, while víking is an activity. Neither word is inherently negative nor associated with violence.

A víkingr is someone (who may or may not identify as a pirate) who undertakes víking expeditions (sometimes to pillage, sometimes not), and whose life and livelihood have strong connections to the sea.

By the mid-eighth century, these people were keen to expand their horizons and branch out from local economies.

This coincided with a number of large and lucrative mercantile towns springing up around north-west Europe in this period.

Among other factors, Vikings travelled further westward and eastward as part of an ongoing and complex power grab for portable wealth, territory, and control of trade routes.

From the 750s on, the Vikings’ advanced shipbuilding technology helped give them the edge.

Gamechanging technology

The unique design of Viking ships and their trademark square sails were absolute gamechangers in this period.

There are many different types of Viking ship, but the most relevant here are the langskip (longship) and knörr (cargo ship).

Like all Viking vessels, these are clinker built. That means the hull’s long, curved sides are assembled out of slightly overlapping planks, and are held together by iron nails (the “clinkers”).

Along with their strong but slender keels and stems, this innovative construction made for incredibly flexible, light, and sinuous vehicles that could be powered by oars or by sail and withstand wild ocean swells.

With their narrow silhouettes and their ability to gently twist and yield to the waves, it’s no wonder longships were called snekkja (serpents), dreki (dragons) and skeið (sliders).

Another small but significant improvement that made longer-distance travel possible was the oar-hole.

Until the early Viking Age, pegs called tholepins stuck up from the gunwales (upper rim of the boat) to hold oars in place and act as fulcrums for rowing. This meant ships’ sides could never be very high above the water. (Imagine trying to row with your oar at head height.)

But by cutting holes through the side planks, which could be plugged when the oars were shipped and the sail raised, it became possible to build taller, more seaworthy ships.

The boats had shallow drafts (meaning not much of it was under the waterline). This enabled these “sea-snakes” to slither further inland than ever before, since they could tackle riverways other boats simply couldn’t navigate. They could also be dragged across land.

Longships also had symmetrical prows (meaning the “back” of the boat was just as high as the “front”).

This design allowed Viking raiders to pull right up on the riverbank, then “hit and run” – without all the slow awkwardness of reversing and turning the whole boat around for the getaway.

Square sails also increased both the distance and speed of Viking travel. Norse explorers like Eirik rauða (“the Red”) and his son Leif (who went to North America nearly 500 years before Columbus) wouldn’t have taken a warship to Iceland or Greenland.

Instead, they probably kitted out a knörr, a heavy-bellied merchant ship much like the one described in an ancient Icelandic text called Egil’s saga

richly painted above the plumbline and fitted with a black-and-red sail […] loaded with stockfish, hides and ermine, and a great quantity of squirrel skins and other furs […] a very valuable cargo.

When powered by four oars, a modern reconstruction of just such a knörr reached a speed of 1.5 knots. With the sail raised it sped along at 13 knots (around 24 km an hour).

A much larger longship with 60 oars could row at 4.5 knots and reach a maximum sailing speed of 17 knots (31.5 km an hour)!

Crafted by hand

The most impressive stats about Viking ships aren’t about how fast or far they went, but rather how much time, effort, and natural resources went into building them. The sheer industry of it all is astonishing.

Every piece was crafted by hand. Axes shaped the floor timbers, planking, masts and beams.

Dozens of oak trees (8-10 metres long and at least a metre across) went into the hull. Dozens more pine trees were burnt to make tar for sealing the wood (600 litres for a 60-oar longship, which took more than 2,000 hours to produce).

More pine and alderwood went into the oars and mast.

Then there’s all the iron: 450kg of it to make the 8,000 nails needed for this same longship.

An average knörr’s sail was 90m² (smaller than the longship’s) and used the wool of 200 sheep, all of which had to be spun into thread and woven into continuous lengths of fabric, each 65cm wide.

This spinning and weaving work took experimental historians 7,850 hours to recreate (around 4.5 years for one person).

Another month was needed to sew the sail panels together, cut it to shape and reinforce its edges. Then there’s the ship’s cordage: so much horsehair, hemp and linden bast (a plant fibre) for 3,000 metres of rope.

This constant and large-scale manufacturing paints an evocative picture of the Vikings’ everyday, shipbuilding life.

It was all hands on deck, so to speak.

Lisa Bennett, Associate Professor in Creative Writing and English Literature, Researcher in Old Norse Literature, Flinders University

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

Are you surrounded by screens?

Today, we rely on technology to do everything from sending emails to ordering food. But being constantly connected can leave us physically and mentally exhausted.

That’s why some people are doing “digital detoxes”, the practice of staying away from devices and social media for a set period of time.

The concept is gaining traction online, with supporters spruiking the health benefits of the “analogue lifestyle”. Some are even paying big bucks to go on “digital retreats”, with the aim of becoming healthier and happier.

But do digital detoxes actually work, or are they just another wellness trend?

What is a ‘digital detox’?

The term “digital detox” stems from detoxification, the process of safely getting a person off an addictive substance such as alcohol or drugs. This is usually done with support from a health-care professional.

So the idea of a digital detox is to step away from technology, to instead experience life with fewer distractions and foster relationships offline.

The trouble with tech

On average, young people in Australia look at screens for nine hours a day. Research suggests adults aren’t much better, with Australians aged between 45 and 64 spending up to six hours each day on screens.

As a result, more people are experiencing information overload, the idea of being physically and emotionally overwhelmed by an immense amount of data. A related concept is social media fatigue, a consequence of being constantly connected through online platforms.

But there are signs people are resisting the pull of technology. Some younger people are swapping screens for hands-on hobbies such as knitting, and joining chess clubs and other offline social activities.

They are also driving trends such as “raw-dogging boredom”, the practice of sitting through long haul flights without headphones. And friction-maxxing, the idea you can become a better, more resilient person by doing tasks that involve some level of difficulty, is also gaining traction online.

So in a sense, digital detoxes are just the latest online trend.

Do ‘digital detoxes’ work?

Current research suggests digital detoxes may have some benefits. But the evidence is far from conclusive.

One 2025 meta-analysis examined 20 randomised controlled trials, all looking at the effects of social media detoxes. It found taking a short break from social media had a small but positive effect on people’s feelings of life satisfaction and self-esteem. Participants also reported feeling less anxious, depressed and lonely.

In another 2025 study, researchers blocked participants’ smartphones so they could only receive calls and texts, over a two-week period. The results were striking. The researchers found this intervention had a greater positive effect on participants’ mental health than antidepressants. Importantly, this was because participants spent less time on their phones, but also spent this time doing beneficial activities such as socialising in person, exercising and being in nature.

Not for everyone

Digital detoxes may impact people differently, due to various factors.

One is cultural context. Research suggests people using social media in collectivist cultures such as Turkey may experience more social pressure to respond quickly and maintain extensive networks, compared to those in more individualistic societies. So people in collectivist cultures may benefit more from taking a break from social media.

Another is gender. Research suggests women mainly use social media to maintain relationships, and that they compare their physical appearance to others. This means they may benefit more from a digital detox, compared to men. One 2020 study found women who took a one-week break from Instagram felt significantly more satisfied with their life than women who stayed on it. However, the researchers did not see the same effect in men.

All about the approach

Current research suggests doing a digital detox may improve your mental health. But the way you approach it matters.

You shouldn’t just go cold turkey on technology. That’s because you’re less likely to sustain that change. One 2023 study found people who reduced their daily smartphone use by one hour experienced stronger and more lasting mental health benefits, compared to those who quit entirely.

Here are some tips to make your digital detox last:

• identify any unhelpful habits, for example checking your phone too often or bringing it everywhere

• make a plan to change those habits, for instance setting app time limits or only checking messages at certain times

• set specific goals, such as taking a break from Instagram for one week

• share your goals with family and friends, both so they can support you and understand why you may not reply to their messages

• monitor your progress, for example by reflecting on whether you feel less anxious or are sleeping better.

It’s hard to stay present and connected in our increasingly digital world. But doing a digital detox could help. Importantly, the aim is not to eliminate technology from your life, but to use it in a more conscious, deliberate way.

Joanne Orlando, Researcher, Digital Wellbeing, Western Sydney University

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

All working Australians will receive a permanent $250 “tax offset” from next year in Treasurer Jim Chalmers fifth budget, which also cracks down on tax breaks for housing investors and trusts.

The tax offset in the budget will cost nearly $6.4 billion over the forward estimates.

Delivering the budget on Tuesday night Chalmers told parliament: “This [package] will help rebalance a system which is more generous to assets than it is to labour”.

As was widely predicted, the budget will limit negative gearing for housing to new builds from July next year.

But existing negatively geared properties will be “grandfathered” out of the change.

The 50% capital gains tax discount, will be replaced with an inflation-adjusted indexation.

This will apply to other assets, such as shares, as well as investment housing.

Chalmers told parliament: “our tax changes will help about 75,000 Australians achieve the dream of home ownership”.

Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson flagged a fight over the housing tax changes. “We won’t be supporting these measures because it fundamentally undermines the pathway for young Australians […] to be able to buy their first home.”

Chalmers said the budget included “the most significant tax reform package in more than a quarter of a century”.

“This is about tax relief and tax reform to make our economy work for more Australians, businesses and future generations.”

“We’re delivering a fairer tax system for workers, first home buyers and future generations.”

The government is also introducing a minimum 30% tax rate on net capital gains from July next year, and on discretionary trusts from July 2028.

Chalmers said Treasury was now forecasting inflation to peak at about 5% because of the Middle East conflict.

“For the same reasons, it’s expecting growth to come in half a percentage point lower next financial year, to be 1.75% overall.”

He also presented “a more severe scenario” of what could happen, where the oil price peaked at US$200 before taking three years to come back down.

“We would still avoid a recession, but unemployment would spike to pre-pandemic levels and inflation would peak above 7%.”

Annual real wage growth is forecast to return from next year, while unemployment is expected to remain in the mid fours.

The budget deficit in the next financial year is projected to be $31.5 billion which is $2.8 billion better than earlier predicted.

Chalmers said the bottom line is expected to be better in every year over the forward estimates and the medium term.

“The budget position has improved by $44.9 billion and this makes it more than a quarter of a trillion dollars better than when we came to office.”

But the budget remains in deficit over the forward estimates and is not forecast to return to surplus until the mid 2030s.

Gross debt is forecast to be $982 billion at the end of this financial year. Chalmers described the budget as “ambitious in the face of adversity”.

“It’s a responsible budget, and a reforming budget, which builds resilience and bolsters our economy.

"There is more cost-of-living relief, more Medicare and more aged care, and more housing.

"It makes the tax system fairer and stronger for workers, businesses, first home buyers and future generations.”

The budget forecasts that Net Overseas Migration will be 295,000 for 2025-26 dropping to 245,000 in 2026-27.

Most of the major changes in the budget had been pre-announced, including the establishment of a new fuel security regime, an extensive haircut to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and $53 billion over the next ten years for defence.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Every four years, the men’s World Cup delivers some certainties. The pitch dimensions are tightly regulated, offside is signaled with a flag, and referees end the match with a blast of a whistle. But one key piece of equipment is changed on purpose: the ball.

Adidas, which has supplied World Cup soccer balls since 1970, introduces a new match ball for every tournament, and with that comes fresh aerodynamic calculations for players. How will it fly through the air, weave and dip?

For the past 20 years, my engineering colleagues in Japan and England and I have put the new balls through their paces, investigating soccer ball aerodynamics. Our work begins by putting balls in wind tunnels to measure drag, side and lift forces. We use the measurements from these tests in trajectory simulations that tell us how the ball will behave in a real-game setting.

That may all sound a little academic, and we do produce an academic paper on our findings. But what our data indicates could mean the difference between a goal or a miss for strikers, a save or a blunder for goalkeepers, and jubilation or heartache for fans.

At the World Cup, the ball is the most important piece of equipment in the biggest tournament of the world’s most popular sport.

This year’s ball, the Trionda, is especially interesting. When FIFA and Adidas unveiled it in fall 2025, the first thing many people noticed was the color and the paneling.

The ball’s red, blue and green graphics correspond to the three host countries, with maple leaf, star and eagle motifs representing Canada, the United States and Mexico. And for the first time in men’s World Cup history, matches will be played with a four-panel ball.

But with so few panels, has Adidas made the ball too smooth? That is the trap engineers fell into with the Jabulani ball used at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa that became notorious for sudden dips and swerves, which made goalkeepers’ lives far trickier.

You do not want the World Cup ball to feel like the start of a science experiment once it is in the air. And if it behaves strangely, players and goalkeepers notice immediately.

The evolution of soccer balls

World Cup balls have come a long way over the decades. If you go back to 1930, the ball looked very different. The first World Cup final used two different leather balls: Argentina’s Tiento in the first half and Uruguay’s T-Model in the second. Both were hand-sewn, multipaneled balls, inflated through a bladder opening that had to be tied off and tucked back beneath the laces. In damp conditions, the leather absorbed water, making the ball heavier and less predictable in play.

By 1994 – when the United States last hosted the men’s tournament – the official ball, Adidas’ Questra, had evolved into a foam-based design. The modern World Cup ball is no longer just stitched leather. It is an engineered aerodynamic surface.

Trionda pushes that evolution further. It has only four panels, the fewest in men’s World Cup history, which have been thermally bonded – melded together using heat and adhesive.

Fewer panels might suggest less total seam length and therefore a smoother ball. And smoothness matters because the thin boundary layer of air clinging to the ball determines where the flow separates, how large a wake forms, and how much drag the ball experiences.

The Trionda has intentionally deep seams, three pronounced grooves on each panel and fine surface texturing.

But will these textures and grooves do the trick? To find that out, my colleagues and I measured the ball’s seam geometry and overall aerodynamic behavior. We compared it with Trionda’s four predecessors: 2022’s Al Rihla, 2018’s Telstar 18, the Brazuca used in 2014 and the Jabulani in 2010.

What the measurements show

In our wind tunnel tests at the University of Tsukuba, we measured something called the drag coefficient, which is a way of describing how much air resistance a ball experiences as it moves.

Using this data, we gained insights into how the airflow changes around the ball after it is kicked. The tests helped identify the drag crisis, the speed range in which changes in the boundary layer and flow separation produce a sharp change in drag, which can alter the ball’s acceleration, trajectory and range.

We found that the Trionda is effectively rougher than those predecessors.

Trionda reaches its drag crisis at a lower speed, at about 27 mph (43 kph). That is below the roughly 31-40 mph (50-65 kph) range for Al Rihla, Telstar 18 and Brazuca, and far below Jabulani’s roughly 49-60 mph (79-97 kph) range, depending on orientation.

Why does all that matter? Because a ball can feel ordinary off the boot and still behave differently in flight. When the drag crisis occurs in the middle of game-relevant speeds, small changes in launch speed, orientation or spin can shift the ball from one aerodynamic regime to another.

That was Jabulani’s problem. Once kicked with little spin, it had a tendency to slow down too much as it passed through its critical-speed range.

Trionda does not look like that kind of ball. It has a more steady and consistent drag coefficient in the range of speeds associated with corner kicks and free kicks.

But there is a trade-off. Our measurements also showed that once Trionda enters the higher-speed, turbulent-flow regime, its drag coefficients are somewhat larger than those of Brazuca, Telstar 18 and Al Rihla.

In plain language, that suggests a hard-hit long ball may lose a little range.

In our simulations, the difference is not huge. But it is large enough that players may notice long kicks coming up a few meters short.

It is also important to note that we tested a nonspinning ball. As such, our results do not provide a prediction of every pass, clearance or free kick fans will see this summer. Balls in flight often spin due to off-center kicks. That, along with altitude, humidity, temperature and air pressure all influence how a ball flies through the air once kicked.

The big test yet to come

Fewer panels and more texturing aren’t the only differences with the new ball.

Trionda also carries technology that has little to do with its flight and a great deal to do with officiating. Like Al Rihla, Trionda includes “connected-ball technology” that lets computers know when the ball is kicked, helping with offside decisions.

But the architecture has changed. In 2022, the measurement unit was suspended at the center of the ball. With Trionda, it sits in a specially created layer inside one panel, with counterbalancing weights in the other three panels. The chip sends data to the video assistant referee, or VAR, system and the tournament’s semi-automated offside system.

That tweak will help referees, but will the new ball in general help or hinder players?

The evidence from our tests suggests that the ball won’t be behaving in a way that leads to baffling and erratic flight.

But the more intriguing possibilities are subtler and outside the scope of our tests. Will the grooves on Trionda help players generate more backspin on the ball, generating more lift and possibly offsetting Trionda’s somewhat larger high-speed drag coefficient?

That is why I keep studying World Cup balls both in the lab and through their behavior in play. Every four years, a new design offers a fresh way to watch physics enter the game, not in theory, but in the movement of an object in which every player on the soccer field must place their trust.

John Eric Goff, Visiting Assistant Professor, Physics, University of Puget Sound

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

When you think of outer space, you’re likely picturing stars, planets and moons. But much of space is filled with clouds of gas, plasma and stardust – known as interstellar clouds.

In the local parts of our galaxy alone there’s a complex of roughly 15 individual interstellar clouds. The Solar System is currently traversing one of them, aptly named the Local Interstellar Cloud. The origin and history of these clouds are believed to be tightly connected to the birth and death of stars. But we can see their imprints right here on Earth, in a place you might not expect – Antarctic ice.

My colleagues and I have been studying stardust trapped in old Antarctic snow and ice to trace the history of our solar neighbourhood, including the Solar System itself.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, we found a subtle clue that reveals our Solar System’s movement through the local interstellar environment over the past 80,000 years.

Looking down to see the sky

Astronomy usually looks outward. Telescopes collect light from distant stars and galaxies, allowing us to observe events across vast stretches of space and time. From these observations, we infer how stars live and die, how elements are formed, and how the universe evolves.

Our approach turns that idea on its head.

Instead of observing the light coming to us, we study the debris of exploding stars right here on Earth. As cosmic furnaces, stars forge many elements in their cores, from carbon and oxygen to calcium and iron. This includes rare isotopes (variants of chemical elements) such as iron-60.

When massive stars explode into supernovae at the end of their life, these elements are ejected into space and become interstellar dust.

Tiny grains of this dust then drift through the galaxy and occasionally find their way to Earth’s surface. Radioactive iron-60, a fingerprint of stellar explosions, is embedded within these grains. By searching for these atoms in geological archives on Earth, we can probe astrophysical events like supernovae long after their light has faded.

This is why Antarctica is so valuable. Its snow accumulates slowly and remains largely undisturbed, forming a layered record that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Each layer captures a snapshot of the material that was present in our cosmic neighbourhood at the time.

Finding stardust in Antarctic ice

When we studied 500kg of recent snow in Antarctica, we unexpectedly found this rare radioactive isotope. Where did it come from? There was no recent near-Earth supernova.

But our solar neighbourhood is filled with 15 clouds, with the Solar System currently traversing at least one of them. Is the stardust waiting in the clouds to be picked up by Earth? If yes, then the amount of stardust Earth collects should be related to their structure: the denser the clouds, the more iron-60 they contain. This was our educated guess in 2019.

Soon, other explanations were brought forward. Millions of years ago Earth received large showers of iron-60 from massive supernovae. Is the iron-60 in Antarctic snow the last remnant or an echo of this signal? A rain that became a drizzle?

To find out, we analysed a 300kg section of Antarctic ice, dating from 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. The process is painstaking. The ice needs to be melted and chemically treated to isolate tiny amounts of iron, including the iron-60 from the stardust.

Then, using the sensitive atom counting technique of accelerator mass spectrometry at the Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility at Australian National University, we counted individual atoms of iron-60.

The expectation was straightforward: based on previous measurements from surface snow of Antarctica and several thousand-year-old ocean sediments, we anticipated a certain steady level of iron-60 deposition.

Instead, we found less. Not zero, but noticeably lower than expected.

This result suggests that less interstellar dust was reaching Earth during that period. This is a remarkable change on a comparatively short astrophysical timescale and does not fit the long timescales of the iron-60 deposits that landed here millions of years ago. Instead, we needed to look for a smaller, more local source for the isotope.

A fitting story

Naturally, astronomers are also quite interested in the clouds around the Solar System. Last year, a study reconstructing the history of the clouds arrived at the conclusion that they most likely originated in a stellar explosion. Furthermore, they found the Solar System has been traversing the Local Interstellar Cloud from sometime between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

If that’s correct, we would expect that the amount of iron-60 collected on Earth should have changed sometime in the same time period – between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

This is exactly what our results showed in Antarctica.

The story doesn’t fit perfectly, though. If these clouds did originate directly from an exploding star, we would expect way more iron-60 than we actually see in Antarctic ice.

Nevertheless, these clouds are imprinted in Earth’s geological record. If we look deeper and analyse even older ice, we might soon unravel the mystery of these local interstellar clouds, revealing their full history and uncertain origins.

Dominik Koll, Honorary Lecturer, Nuclear Physics, Australian National University

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

You’re trying to book concert tickets before they sell out. You click the link and before you can make the payment, you’re asked to identify traffic lights, bicycles or blurry crosswalks in a grid of tiny images.

Again.

For many people, this has become a routine part of life. Logging into financial apps, shopping online or creating accounts increasingly involves “proving you are human”.

These systems are known as CAPTCHA. Why are they everywhere?

The short answer is that websites are fighting a rapidly escalating war against bots: automated software that imitate human behaviour online. And thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), those bots are becoming even smarter, cheaper and harder to detect than ever before.

Why websites need proof you are human

Huge amounts of online traffic now come from automated systems. Some are helpful, such as search engine crawlers indexing pages for Google search.

Others are far less welcome, and may involve phishing, spam, fake accounts, passwords violation, misinformation, and distributed denial of service attacks overloading web servers. In some areas, AI agents now generate automated online traffic that exceeds human traffic altogether. Modern AI systems can generate convincing text, imitate browsing patterns and even solve some CAPTCHA puzzles.

At the same time, companies are increasingly worried about bots scraping online content to train AI systems.

As a result, more websites are adding verification systems simply to keep abuse under control.

How CAPTCHA actually works

CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. The original idea was simple: give users a task humans find easy, but computers find difficult.

Early CAPTCHA systems often involved distorted text. Later versions switched to image-recognition tasks such as selecting all the squares containing traffic lights or bicycles. Google’s reCAPTCHA became one of the best-known examples. Earlier versions even helped digitise books and improve street-view image recognition while users solved puzzles.

But computer vision has improved rapidly in recent years. Advances in AI mean bots can now solve many traditional CAPTCHA challenges surprisingly well. Researchers have repeatedly shown that modern AI systems can bypass some CAPTCHA systems with high success rates.

That is why today’s CAPTCHA systems rely less on puzzles and more on behavioural analysis.

When users click the CAPTCHA link, the system analyses many background signals, such as mouse movements, typing speed, IP addresses, device information, and interaction timing that reflect human behaviours. Humans tend to behave in inconsistent ways. Bots are usually more predictable.

If the system is sufficiently confident you are human, you may never see an image puzzle at all. But if something appears suspicious, the system may trigger harder tests.

Moving beyond traditional CAPTCHA puzzles

While some bots now use AI capable of solving image-recognition tasks, others simply outsource CAPTCHA solving to cheap human labour services, where real people complete challenges for a small payment. This has turned CAPTCHA into an ongoing arms race. That may explain why CAPTCHA tests often feel harder and more frustrating than they used to.

As AI continues to improve, websites will likely move beyond traditional CAPTCHA puzzles. Future systems may increasingly rely on behavioural biometrics, such as typing rhythm or scrolling style, device verification systems, invisible background risk scoring, and AI systems designed to detect other AI systems.

In many cases, users may no longer even notice the verification process happening.

CAPTCHA tests may seem like a minor annoyance, but they reflect a much larger paradigm shift online. For decades, websites largely assumed visitors were human. Increasingly, that assumption no longer holds. As AI-generated traffic continues to grow, proving we are human online may become an even more common part of everyday life.

Yang Xiang, Professor, Computer Science, Swinburne University of Technology

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

Few phrases in literature have travelled as widely as “all for one, and one for all”. It has come to signify loyalty, courage and a form of friendship that appears to transcend circumstance.

First published in 1844 in serial form, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) quickly established itself as one of the most compelling adventure narratives of the 19th century. Dumas was among the most prolific and widely read writers of his age, working across drama, journalism, travel writing and historical fiction on an extraordinary scale.

His major novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–46) and the cycle of novels featuring the young adventurer Gascon d’Artagnan, incorporating The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte of Bragelonne (1847-50), were shaped by serial publication, which demanded pace, suspense and strong character differentiation.

At the same time, as lesser-known works such as Isaac Laquedem (1852–1553) suggest, Dumas conceived of his writing not only as popular entertainment, but as ambitious historical narrative on an epic scale.

This dual orientation, to mass readership and large-scale historical imagination, helps explain the structure of The Three Musketeers, where vivid character types, rapid plotting, and historical setting combine to produce a narrative that is at once accessible and enduring.

History and narrative

Recent developments have returned attention to the historical figure behind the story. In March 2026, archaeologists in Maastricht uncovered remains believed to belong to Charles de Batz de Castelmore (c.1611–1673), also known as d’Artagnan, reportedly killed during the siege of the city during the Franco-Dutch War.

Scientific confirmation remains pending. Yet the discovery matters less for what it proves than for what it reveals: the persistent overlap between history and narrative. Dumas’s novel has long occupied that space, drawing authority from the 17th century, while reshaping it for 19th-century readers.

Set in France during the reign of Louis XIII (r.1610–1643) and shaped by the political reach of Cardinal Richelieu (in office 1624–1642), The Three Musketeers brings together court intrigue, ambition and honour in a tightly constructed narrative world.

From the outset, Dumas signals that he is not writing history in a strict sense. Drawing on supposed memoirs and anecdotal fragments, he constructs a world defined by rivalry, violence and performance.

This is not a flaw but a method. The novel’s enduring appeal rests not on historical accuracy, but its capacity to distil and dramatise ideals: comradeship, honour and masculine identity. These are not stable conditions; they are values under pressure, shaped by the political culture of early modern France.

The narrative begins with the arrival in Paris of the young d’Artagnan, a provincial outsider seeking advancement in the royal service. His ambition reflects the social mobility of the period, even within a hierarchical society.

Through a chain of misunderstandings, he offends Athos, Porthos and Aramis, arranging to duel each in turn. Yet this ritualised violence, rooted in the honour culture of the 17th century, produces an unexpected outcome. When confronted by the guards of Richelieu, the four men fight together and emerge as allies. Conflict becomes the basis of solidarity.

From this moment, the personal and the political become inseparable. The narrative draws in the court of Anne of Austria, queen consort of France from 1615, and her connection with the English courtier George Villiers (1592–1628), whose influence in Anglo-French relations shaped the politics of the 1620s.

The result is a world structured by secrecy, surveillance and manipulation. Episodes such as the quarrel at Meung, when d'Artagnan is affronted by a man who mocks his shabby horse, or the Musketeers’ recovery of the queen’s diamonds are set against the backdrop of wider tensions, including the lead-up to the Siege of La Rochelle (1627–28).

Chance and calculation operate together, but always within a defined political order.

Models of masculinity

At the centre of the novel stand four figures whose differences are as important as their unity. Their bond, expressed in their famous motto, does not arise from likeness but from contrast. Each represents a distinct model of masculinity shaped by the social and political expectations of the early 17th century.

Athos embodies restraint and authority. Marked by a concealed past, he reflects an older aristocratic code rooted in lineage and honour. His authority derives from self-control rather than display, recalling a model of noble identity already under strain in the 1620s.

Porthos operates through display. His concern with wealth, clothing and reputation reflects a world in which status must be asserted as well as inherited. His performative masculinity reveals the instability of rank in a society where appearance and recognition are closely linked.

Aramis is divided between religious vocation and worldly ambition. His career reflects the continuing entanglement of church and state in 17th-century France. His duplicity mirrors a political culture in which allegiance is rarely singular.

D’Artagnan is the outsider navigating this system. As a provincial noble of limited means, he represents a form of social mobility tied to service and merit. His success depends on his ability to read and adapt to a changing political environment.

These four men do not form a natural unity. Their friendship is constructed through duels, shared risks and mutual dependence. It is sustained by adherence to a code of honour rooted in the practices of their time. Their bond is contingent and historically grounded.

The motto “all for one, and one for all” should be read in this light. It expresses an aspiration rather than a condition. The bond it describes must be enacted within a culture that constantly tests it.

Duelling culture provides the mechanism for this enactment. Violence is not an anomaly, but a recognised part of aristocratic life in 17th-century France. Honour is defended publicly; identity is secured through action. The transformation of rivalry into solidarity is not accidental, but structural.

This model of comradeship rests on three elements: loyalty, risk and shared violence. Each reinforces the others. Trust is established through danger, and collective identity overrides individual interest when required. Friendship becomes a practice rather than a feeling.

Such a model differs sharply from modern conceptions of friendship. Where contemporary ideals emphasise choice and emotional affinity, Dumas presents a form of association shaped by obligation and discipline. It reflects the conditions of its historical setting.

Politics in the novel follows the same pattern. It is performative rather than transparent. Power operates through networks, intermediaries and controlled displays of loyalty. Richelieu’s authority rests as much on information and influence as on formal position.

Within this system, allegiance is unstable. The Musketeers serve the king, yet act with a degree of autonomy that reflects the fluidity of early modern political structures. Intrigue becomes the normal mode of engagement.

Loyalty, honour and friendship

Women play a decisive role in this political world. Anne of Austria’s position is both central and precarious, shaped by dynastic politics and international alliances. D'Artagnan’s love interest Madame Bonacieux, though socially modest, becomes a conduit for political action.

Their roles show that power extends beyond formal institutions. Through these figures, Dumas demonstrates how private relationships shape public outcomes. Emotional ties become political forces. The distinction between personal and political collapses, reflecting the realities of court society.

The novel’s continued relevance lies in this clarity. Its themes remain legible because they are historically grounded, yet structurally recognisable. Loyalty is tested, honour is contested, and friendship becomes a form of identity.

The cultural afterlife of The Three Musketeers reflects this. Across numerous adaptations, the figures of d’Artagnan and the Musketeers remain recognisable because they embody enduring patterns of association rather than fixed historical realities.

The appeal lies in precision rather than simplicity. The moral framework is clear, even when outcomes are uncertain. The narrative’s pace conceals a consistent structure grounded in historical context.

“All for one, and one for all” endures because it articulates a solution to a persistent problem: how to sustain unity in a world defined by competition and mistrust.

The novel does not resolve this tension. Instead, it stages it within the political and social conditions of 17th-century France. The Musketeers’ bond is fragile, shaped by ambition, pride and circumstance. But it holds because it is continually reinforced.

In this sense, The Three Musketeers offers not a record of the past but a historically grounded model of association. It suggests solidarity is possible, but only under conditions of risk and mutual obligation.

That is why the motto persists. It names an ideal that is difficult to realise, yet difficult to abandon. Amid strained alliances and shifting loyalties of our own time, it reads less as nostalgia than as a challenge: not what such unity once meant, but whether it can still be sustained.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Professor of History, Australian Catholic University

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

Four percent of Americans – roughly 12 million people – believe that “lizard people” secretly control the Earth. At least, that was the finding of an infamous 2013 public opinion survey.

Do so many people really believe such outlandish claims? Or do results like these partly reflect people giving silly answers or deliberately skewing surveys for fun?

US psychiatrist Alexander Scott believes the latter plays a significant role.

Using the survey as an example, he coined the term “the Lizardman constant” to describe the idea that a certain amount of noise and trolling will always exist in surveys about unusual beliefs.

As Scott warned: “Any possible source of noise – jokesters, cognitive biases, or deliberate misbehaviour – can easily overwhelm the signal.”

As researchers who study uncommon beliefs such as conspiracy theories, we wanted to investigate how this kind of cheeky trolling can muddy the waters.

Trolls and true believers

Building on earlier Australian research, we surveyed New Zealanders to test how common dishonest or joking responses were in conspiracy theory surveys.

We did this in two ways. First, we directly asked people a yes/no question at the end of the survey:

“Did you respond insincerely at any earlier point in this survey? In other words, did you give any responses that were actually just joking, trolling, or otherwise not indicating what you really think?”

Second, we included in the survey a “conspiracy theory” so ridiculous we could assume most, if not all, people who said they believed it were taking the mickey.

We asked them if they believed:

The Canadian Armed Forces have been secretly developing an elite army of genetically engineered, super intelligent, giant raccoons to invade nearby countries.

In our representative online sample of 810 New Zealanders, 8.3% of respondents confessed to being insincere in the survey.

Another 7.2% said they thought the Canadian raccoon army theory was probably or definitely true. That proportion – similar to findings from Australia – would equate to more than 300,000 adult New Zealanders.

To complicate things slightly, there was some overlap between those admitting to insincere answers and those claiming to believe the raccoon conspiracy. Combined, 13.3% of respondents fell into one or both groups – roughly one in eight people not appearing to take the survey seriously.

Importantly, these respondents were also much more likely to endorse other conspiracy theories, inflating estimates of how widespread those beliefs really are.

For instance, 6.5% of the full sample endorsed the claim that governments around the world are covering up the fact that 5G mobile networks spread coronavirus.

But once we removed the insincere responders, that figure dropped by more than half to 2.7%.

Across 13 different conspiracy theories, the estimated proportion of believers fell substantially once those respondents were excluded.

Another interesting insight from our study was that people endorsing contradictory conspiracy theories were much more likely to show signs of responding insincerely.

Previous studies have found some people appear to believe conspiracy theories that directly contradict each other. In our survey, for example, some participants agreed both that COVID-19 is a myth and that governments are covering up the fact that 5G networks spread the virus.

But nearly three-quarters of those respondents also showed signs of joking or dishonest answers.

This suggests genuinely believing contradictory conspiracy theories may be less common than previously thought.

Not every conspiracy believer is joking

Our findings add further weight to the idea that surveys may overestimate how many people truly believe some conspiracy theories – thanks, in part, to trolls.

But does that mean all conspiracy theory research is bunk?

Fortunately not. Most research in this area is not focused on counting conspiracy believers, but on understanding why people hold these beliefs and what effects they can have.

We tested several well-established findings from earlier conspiracy theory research to see whether they still held up once insincere respondents were removed from the data.

For example, previous studies have found that people who endorse conspiracy theories are more likely to see the world as a dangerous and threatening place.

We found the same pattern. In fact, removing insincere respondents made little difference to the broader relationships identified in earlier research.

Nevertheless, we recommend that future surveys include ways to gauge whether respondents are answering sincerely and account for this in the analysis. At the very least, researchers should acknowledge that trolls and joking responses can distort their results.

While our research suggests some people are taking the mickey in surveys, it also shows a significant minority genuinely appear to believe some of these claims.

In some cases – such as believing authorities are covering up the fact that the Earth is flat – this may be relatively harmless. But other conspiracy beliefs can lead to real-world harm.

Good-quality research is essential for understanding how sincere believers end up down these rabbit holes, and how those beliefs influence real-world behaviour.

Research into why people embrace conspiracy theories – and the real-world consequences of those beliefs – remains important.

But when surveys suggest millions may believe in lizard overlords or genetically engineered raccoon armies, it is also worth remembering the “Lizardman constant”: some respondents may simply be having us on.

The authors acknowledge the contributions of Rob Ross, Mathew Ling and Stephen Hill to this article.

John Kerr, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Public Health, University of Otago; Mathew Marques, Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology, La Trobe University, and Matt Williams, Associate Professor in Psychology, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

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

Archaeologists have found something unexpected inside a 1,600-year-old Roman-era Egyptian mummy: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad. It wasn’t placed beside the body, but inside the mummy’s abdomen. But the real surprise isn’t just where the fragment was found. It’s how it got there. To understand, we must go back – to the Iliad itself, and to what it became in the Roman world.

In The Iliad, a poem shaped in the 8th century BC and attributed to Homer, the Trojan war does not end in triumph or renewal. It ends in devastation. The poem closes at the edge of collapse, with Troy reduced to a landscape of heroic ruin. And yet, this is not where the story ends.

According to later Roman tradition, one Trojan escaped. Aeneas – son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite – fled the burning city carrying his father on his shoulders and the household gods in his hands. He moved west, across the Mediterranean, towards Italy, where he became the ancestor of Rome.

This continuation did not come from the Iliad itself. It was shaped centuries later, most famously in Virgil’s Aeneid. But it changed the meaning of the Trojan war entirely. The past, in other words, was actively reorganised – through stories that could be reworked, extended and connected across time and space.

Turning defeat into origin

For Roman audiences, the Trojan war was more than a distant Greek legend. It became a way of thinking about origins, identity and power.

Claiming descent from Troy was more than a matter of tracing a lineage. It required constant cultural work – through storytelling, education and shared knowledge. The Iliad provided the raw material: characters, events and genealogies that could be reshaped and redeployed across generations.

Across the Roman Empire, educated elites learned Homer as part of their schooling. They quoted him in speeches, analysed him in classrooms and used him to signal cultural authority. To know the Iliad was to speak a language that others across the empire understood.

A senator in Rome, a teacher in Asia Minor or a student in Egypt could all draw on the same stories. The poem created a shared frame of reference – one that allowed very different people to situate themselves within a common past.

In the Roman imperial period, the site of ancient Troy – located in modern-day Turkey – became a destination. Emperors invested in its development, tying it directly to Rome’s claimed Trojan origins. Under Emperor Augustus, Troy was folded into the political language of empire. And under Emperor Hadrian, it became part of a wider culture of travel, memory and heritage.

A visitor to Troy in the 2nd century AD would have arrived at a curated landscape. There were baths, places to stay and spaces for performance. A small theatre – the Odeion – was built directly into the ancient citadel, so that the remains of the bronze age city, understood as the setting of the legendary battles around Troy, formed a dramatic backdrop.

Visitors could walk through what was presented as the setting of Homeric epic, experiencing the Trojan war as something anchored in the ground beneath their feet.

From Troy to Egypt

Across the Roman Empire, the Iliad circulated as a living text: copied, taught and read. Egypt, one of Rome’s most important provinces, was no exception. Yet here, Homer circulated within a cultural landscape that differed in important ways from the Greek literary world in which the poem had first taken shape.

For Roman observers, Egypt often appeared as a place where antiquity was materially preserved as well as remembered – through temples, monuments and practices that emphasised continuity with the past. At the same time, it was a deeply hybrid society, where Egyptian, Greek and Roman traditions interacted in complex ways.

Homer was among the most widely copied authors in Roman Egypt – read and taught as a marker of education and cultural belonging and deeply embedded in everyday literary culture.

The Homeric version of the Trojan War was particularly prominent among the Greek-speaking elite, especially in urban centres such as Oxyrhynchus, where the mummy was found. Other versions of the story – which placed greater emphasis on Paris and Helen’s stay in Egypt, as reported by Herodotus based on accounts from Egyptian priests – were probably more widespread among the broader Egyptian population.

The initial media coverage of the discovery of the fragment inside the Egyptian mummy suggested the text was deliberately chosen to accompany the deceased. As a personally meaningful object, perhaps reflecting their education or cultural identity.

The most telling explanation, however, may be the most straightforward. Discarded or damaged papyri could be reused as inexpensive material. The fragment may therefore have functioned as stuffing – bundled together and inserted into the body cavity without particular regard for its literary content.

The very fact that a scrap of the Iliad could end up as disposable filling, however, speaks to how deeply Homer had penetrated everyday life in Roman Egypt.

A text in motion

To make sense of the past in the Roman world meant moving between story and monument, between genealogy and deep time. Each perspective made the others more intelligible.

The Iliad helped create a world in which different pasts could be connected, compared and reshaped. By linking stories, places and traditions across the Mediterranean, the Roman world turned the past into a flexible resource – one that could generate identity, authority and belonging in shifting contexts.

This is why the Iliad mattered: it circulated across many different settings. It shaped elite education, but it was also part of everyday reading culture. At Troy, it helped transform the city into a place of cultural memory. The text itself also had a long material afterlife, surviving not only as an authoritative story, but through manuscripts and writing materials that were copied, passed on – or even reused for entirely different purposes.

Its most enduring insight is therefore this: the past is not something simply preserved, but something continuously made and remade – through the stories, practices and materials that carry it across time.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Stephan Blum, Research Associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen and Stefan Baumann, Assistant Professor of Egyptology, KU Leuven

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

A great Tyrannosaurus rex strides through the conifer trees of her territory, sniffing the air. She picks up the scent from the carcass of a dead horned dinosaur, Triceratops, that she was feeding on yesterday. She walks over and strips off some more shreds of meat, but the smell is foul even for her.

She goes down to the lake to drink and small crocodiles and turtles scuttle into the water. But she hardly sees them. Of more interest is an armoured dinosaur, Ankylosaurus, lurking nearby. However, she knows this dinosaur won’t be an easy kill and she isn’t desperate enough for food to risk a fight. Little does she know there are bigger dangers ahead. She looks up and sees a bright light racing downwards accompanied by faint crackling and sizzling noises.

Our T. rex has excellent hearing for low frequency sounds and she is disturbed by the vibrations she can feel. But her upset only lasts for a moment. In a flash, she has been burnt to a crisp and her world changed forever.

This all happened 66 million years ago, when a huge asteroid famously hit the Earth in the area of what is now the Caribbean. At the end of the Cretaceous period, sea levels were 100–200 metres higher than today, so the shores of the Caribbean lay far inland over eastern Mexico and the southern United States. The impact happened entirely within these waters.

The event triggered instant changes to our planet and its atmosphere and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and about half Earth’s other species. But what would it have been like to experience such a gargantuan impact? What would you have seen, heard or smelled? And how would you have died – or survived?

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

As experts on meteoritics and palaeontology, respectively, we’ve created a detailed timeline, based on decades of research, to take you right there. So let’s start by travelling back in time to the very last day of the Cretaceous.

T-minus one day

All is calm and the Cretaceous day proceeds as usual. In what will soon be ground zero, it is pleasantly warm, about 26°C, and wet. It often is. For about a week, the asteroid has been visible only at night. Because the giant rock is heading straight towards Earth, it looks like a motionless star. There is no dramatic tail; this is a rocky asteroid rather than a comet.

In the last 24 hours, the light becomes visible during the daytime. But it still looks like a star or planet, getting brighter in the final few hours before impact.

T equals 0: the impact

If you were close by, you would first have experienced a brief light and sound show. Minutes to seconds before the impact, you’d have seen the bright fireball, and its accompanying crackling or fizzing noises. This sizzling sound is a result of the photo-acoustic effect: the intense light of the fireball warms the ground, which then heats the air above it, causing pressure waves, or sound.

Next, a deafening sonic boom, which occurs because the asteroid is travelling faster than the speed of sound. But the asteroid is so huge, perhaps 10km in diameter, that it almost certainly hits the ground before any living creature near the impact zone has time to run for cover.

The asteroid’s enormous energy forms a crater through a series of processes that together take only a few seconds. As the asteroid collides with the surface, its kinetic (movement) energy is instantly transferred to the surface as a combination of kinetic, thermal (heat) and seismic energy (released during earthquakes). This results in a series of shock waves that heat and compress both the asteroid and its target.

As the shock waves propagate, rocks fracture, break up and are ejected, producing a bowl-shaped depression, or transient cavity, about ten seconds after impact. The heat and compression also melt and vaporise large volumes of material, including the asteroid itself, releasing a fountain of incandescent vapour (its temperature is more than 10,000 K, or 9726.85°C).

Over the next few seconds, the cavity increases in size to many times the diameter of the original asteroid. Simulations suggest that around 20 seconds after impact, the transient cavity is at least 30km deep – deeper than the deepest depth currently known on Earth, the 11km Challenger Deep valley, part of the Pacific Ocean’s Marianas Trench. The rim of the crater is over 20km high – more than twice the height of 8,900m Mount Everest.

But this enormous feature lasts for less than a minute before it starts to collapse. Within three minutes of the impact, the centre of the crater has rebounded to form a peak several kilometres high. The peak only lasts about two minutes before collapsing back into the crater.

Whether a dinosaur or a dung beetle, if you were near the transient cavity you would have been incinerated instantly by the blast. But even if you were up to 2,000km from the epicentre, you’d likely have been killed quickly by the thermal radiation and supersonic winds now spreading out from the impact site.

T-plus 5 minutes

Five minutes after the impact, the winds have “eased” to those of a category 5 hurricane, flattening everything within about 1,500km of the impact. Destroying everything, that is, which has not already been burnt. Atmospheric temperatures in the region rise to over 500K (226.85°C). This would feel like being inside an oven – causing burns, heatstroke and death. Wood and plant matter ignite, creating fires everywhere.

Because the asteroid struck the sea, the atmosphere is also filled with super-heated steam, making the hurricane-force winds even deadlier.

Next come the tidal waves, triggered by the vast quantities of displaced rock and water. These 100-metre megatsunamis first strike the shores of what is now the Gulf of Mexico, engulfing the land before depositing huge amounts of debris as they retreat.

By now, the crater has almost reached its final dimensions – 180km across and 20km deep. But making an enormous hole in the ground isn’t the only outcome of the impact. All the rock and vapour displaced during the collision has to go somewhere. Several locations in Northern America show that metre-sized blocks of debris from the impact were thrown distances of hundreds of kilometres.

So if you were 2,000km to 3,000km from the epicentre and survived the first few seconds, you’d most likely die from overheating, earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, tsunami-driven floods or being hit by impact melt.

But what is happening much further away? In the first five minutes after impact, dinosaurs roaming the Cretaceous forests of what are now China or New Zealand are so far undisturbed.

But it won’t be long before that changes.

T-plus one hour

Shockwaves on land and sea are only minor inconveniences compared with the fire that is still radiating down from the sky. Some of the impact energy has been transferred into the atmosphere, heating the air and dust to incandescence.

An hour after impact, a belt of dust has circled the globe. Deposits of solidified molten droplets (impact spherules) and mineral grains have been found in numerous locations from New Zealand in the south to Denmark in the north. In these locations, you would not have been aware of the tsunamis around the Americas or the wildfires, but the skies would certainly have begun to darken.

T-plus one day

By now, huge tsunamis are moving east across the Atlantic and west across the Pacific, entering the Indian Ocean from both sides.

They are still around 50m high – causing death and destruction across many coasts around the world. By comparison, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami reached heights of up to 30 metres. Tsunamis kill fishes and marine life that are washed high on the shore and then dumped, just as they kill coastal trees and drown land animals. But the tsunamis gradually fade away and probably don’t wipe out any entire species – at least on their own.

The hurricane force winds have also died down, but tropical storm strength winds are whipping up debris and causing further chaos and destruction across the tsunami-affected areas. The burning sky is also triggering wildfires across the globe – which, in turn, carry ever more soot into the atmosphere. The sooty signature of these wildfires has been found deposited as carbon particles in sediments from the K-Pg boundary – a 66-million-year-old thin clay layer.

Further away, in what is modern Europe and Asia, the skies continue to fill up with dust and soot, as they do everywhere. Temperatures start to drop as sunlight is blocked. Trees and plants in general, including phytoplankton, close down as if for winter, unable to photosynthesise. Any animals that rely on warm conditions ultimately hunker down and die.

T-plus one week

It’s getting darker and darker. Simulations of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface following the impact indicate that, after about a week, the solar flux (the amount of heat and light per a certain area) is just one thousandth of that prior to the impact. This is caused by particles of dust and soot in the atmosphere.

The continued decrease in light levels is accompanied by a global drop in surface temperatures of at least 5°C. This means that most of the dinosaurs and other large flying and swimming reptiles probably die from freezing within the course of this first week (smaller reptiles with slower metabolisms or more flexible diets could survive longer). Cooling temperatures and cloud cover also lead to rain. But not just any rain. Storms of acid rain fall across the Earth.

Two separate mechanisms generate acid rain. The first is down to the geology of the impact region. The asteroid happened to hit an area of sediments rich in sulphur, which vaporised and caused sulphur oxides (acidic and pungent gas compounds composed of sulphur and oxygen) to be part of the plume of plasma blasted into the atmosphere. Second, the energy of the collision was sufficient to turn nitrogen and oxygen into nitrogen oxides – highly reactive gases that can form smog.

The dropping temperature ultimately allows water vapour to condense into drops, and the sulphur and nitrogen oxides dissolve to form sulphuric and nitric acids. This is sufficient to generate a rapid drop in pH. Early models suggest that the pH of the rain might be as low as 1 – the same acidity as battery acid.

At this point, Earth is not a great place to be. Rotting vegetation, choking smoke and sulphur aerosols combine to make the planet stink. Plants and animals on land and in shallow seas that have survived the darkness and cold succumb to the corrosive acid rain and ocean acidification. Acid rain also kills trees by leaching nutrients such as calcium, magnesium and potassium from the soil. Shallow marine shellfish, crustaceans and corals also die as acid seawater destroys their skeletons.

T-plus one year

Winds die down, wildfires are extinguished and the oceans are once again calm. It might appear that the asteroid collision is just a scar on the ocean floor. But its effects are still destructive. The atmosphere is still filled with dust and the Sun hasn’t shone for a year. Temperatures have continued to drop, with the average surface temperature now 15°C lower than before the impact. Winter has come.

Any dinosaurs or marine reptiles that survived the first week of freezing conditions would have died very soon after. A year after the impact, only rotted skeletons of these behemoths remain. Here and there, smaller animals like mammals the size of rats and insects would be nestling in crevices, barely surviving on their reserves and decaying plants.

Indeed, it has not been a good year for life on Earth: over 50% of plants have died out because of the cold and lack of sunlight. And similar losses have occurred among terrestrial animals and species in the acidified, shallow sea waters.

While most plant groups and many of the modern groups of insects, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals recover reasonably rapidly, things don’t look great for other species. Dinosaurs and pterosaurs living on land are extinct, as are many marine reptiles, ammonites, belemnites and rudist bivalves in the oceans. Ammonites and belemnites are high in their food chains, and so suffer not only from the cold and acidification but also from the loss of abundant food resources, such as smaller marine organisms.

T-plus ten years

The Earth is still in the grip of a fierce winter. Although most of the sulphur has rained out of the atmosphere, dust and soot particles remain. The average surface temperature is still about 5°C lower than before the impact. The main oceans have not frozen, but inland lakes and rivers around the world are iced over.

Clearly, there were no humans about at this time – there weren’t even any larger mammals. But given the only species that survived were those that could burrow or live below water, it is unlikely that you could have survived this long.

Surviving plant and animal groups such as turtles, smaller crocodiles, lizards, snakes, some ground-dwelling birds and small mammals repopulate the Earth at this point. But they are forced back to limited areas of relative safety a long way from the impact site. These areas are now receiving sufficient sunlight for plants and phytoplankton to photosynthesise again. As leaves and seeds provide the basis for the food chains on land and in the sea, life begins to rebuild.

Eventually, life returns to the devastated landscapes, but ecosystems are very different and the dinosaurs are no more.

T-plus 66 million years

Today, 66 million years after the impact, the scars of the collision are hidden within geological strata – and scientists have started deciphering them. It was in 1980 that researchers first reported evidence of the impact. In their classic paper, Luis Alvarez, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, and co-authors, described a sudden enrichment in the element iridium in a specific clay layer in Denmark and in Italy.

Iridium is rare in surface rocks because most of it was sequestered in Earth’s core when the planet first formed. However, iridium is found in meteorites, and Alvarez and colleagues inferred that the rate of accumulation of the metal in the sediments was so high that it could only have been produced by impact of a gigantic meteorite.

Because the scientists had only observed the iridium spike in two locations, the impact hypothesis was rejected by many scientists at the time. However, through the 1980s, iridium spikes were identified in clay layers at more and more locations – in muds laid down on land, in lakes, in the sea.

Support for an impact hypothesis strengthened when a crater of the correct age was found in 1991. The crater is buried beneath younger rocks, but clearly visible in geophysical surveys, lying half on land in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, and half offshore. Since 1990, evidence for the impact has increased, not least when scientists discovered that there was indeed a sharp cooling event at the end of the Cretaceous.

In total, it is estimated that half the species of plants and animals alive at the end of the Cretaceous disappeared. It was once thought that surviving groups such as many plants, insects, molluscs, lizards, birds and mammals somehow escaped unscathed. But detailed study shows that this is not the case – they were all hit hard.

But, by chance or luck, enough individuals and species were able to survive the cold and absence of food, or were in parts of the world where the effects were less extreme. As the world returned to normal, they had the opportunity to expand rapidly into their old niches, but also to occupy the space vacated by extinct groups. In fact, one important consequence of the extinction of the dinosaurs, apex predators in their heyday, was the successful spread and evolution of mammals.

When Alvarez and colleagues first described the drop in temperature following the impact, they called it a “nuclear winter”, reflecting the political climate of the early 1980s. Now we might be more inclined to describe the effects as a global climate change – similar events are currently resulting from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (flooding, temperature fluctuations).

It is salutary to think that without the asteroid collision, primates might never have reached the level we are at today. But it is equally salutary to consider that modern humans are causing some of the same changes to the atmosphere that ultimately killed our reptilian forbears and may one day also lead to our own demise.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• ‘It ain’t no unicorn’: meet the researchers who’ve interviewed 130 Bigfoot hunters

• The truth about child IQ: research shows it fluctuates and may be an unreliable predictor of future success

• Is time a fundamental part of reality? A quiet revolution in physics suggests not

• Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack

• Inside Porton Down: what I learned during three years at the UK’s most secretive chemical weapons laboratory

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Michael J. Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of Bristol and Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University

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

Every Friday morning in a community hall near Fremantle, something quietly extraordinary happens.

Chairs are arranged in a rough semicircle. Someone has brought a tray of biscotti from a recipe carried, unchanged, from Vasto, in the Abruzzo region of Italy. An organetto, a small button accordion common in southern Italian folk music, opens with a tarantella, a fast and joyful southern Italian dance tune. Before the first verse has ended, a dozen voices have joined. Some are strong. Some waver. All are unmistakably present.

Later, with the strumming of a guitar, the group finds its way to O Sole Mio. One man, who, according to his wife, barely talks anymore, closes his eyes and sings every word without hesitation. A woman in her 80s reaches for the hand beside her. When someone misses an entry, the laughter becomes part of the song.

As a researcher working with Italian migrant communities, I have been watching scenes like this for more than 15 years.

I have become convinced of something aged care policy has been relatively slow to recognise: the community choir is one of the most powerful cultural institutions in multicultural Australia, and we are at risk of losing it.

Italy has one of the richest choral traditions in the world. When Italian migrants arrived in Australia in the post-war decades, they planted vines, built parishes and founded social clubs. At the heart of many of those clubs was a choir.

These were not simply hobbies or nostalgic habits. They were acts of cultural survival, quiet assertions of who these men and women were in a country that often expected them to become someone else.

Reaching people through song

More than 411,000 Australians are currently living with dementia, and numbers are projected to more than double by 2058. More than one in four people living with dementia in Australia come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

For migrants living with dementia, memory loss weakens the link between language, culture, and the ability to express and be recognised as belonging.

As the condition progresses, it strips away the most recently acquired language first. Migrants who spent decades speaking fluent English may revert to the dialect of their childhood village, leaving them unable to communicate with carers, other residents or sometimes their own families.

But, as I have witnessed again and again, song can sometimes reach people in ways conventional care struggles to.

In a project I conducted at a community-based aged care centre in Fremantle, one woman, Nina*, had largely stopped communicating. She sat quietly through most sessions. But when a Calabrian lira was played, a traditional bowed string instrument used by shepherds in Calabria, something shifted immediately. Its sound was ancient and deeply earthly, carrying something of the mountains and pastures and communal life of a world she had left 60 years earlier. Her face changed. Her hands began to move. She hummed, then sang, every word clear, every note in place.

Familiar songs are often preserved in what is known as procedural memory: the same deep-rooted system that remembers how to ride a bike or tie a shoelace. This type of memory is far more resistant to dementia than the memory that stores recent events and languages learned later in life.

The art of witnessing

There are several words and phrases sociologists use to describe what I am witnessing.

“Habitus” is a form of cultural “muscle memory” we build over a lifetime. When Italian migrants sing songs they first heard as children they are re-enacting something written into the body through years of shared practice.

“Collective effervescence” is that electric feeling when a group of people share an intense experience together and, for a moment, feel like one. The community hall near Fremantle becomes, for those two hours each Friday, something closer to sacred space: the Italian tricolour on the wall, the smell of food from the kitchen, a dozen voices locking into harmony.

“Embodied selfhood” is the idea that who we are is expressed not only through conscious thought, but through the body itself, in gesture, movement and interaction.

I see all these elements in action every Friday morning.

A new way for ageing

The choir I helped establish three years ago in Fremantle was built on the conviction that culturally specific music is not a luxury in aged care, but an ethical obligation.

Second- and third-generation Italian-Australians are now joining it.

One woman, Josephine* comes every Friday with her mother, who has dementia. Josephine told me “this is where she comes alive”.

The wife of the man who barely speaks anymore told me when he leaves the choir on Friday afternoon he walks differently. He stands taller.

Australia’s aged care system is undergoing significant reform. The question of what meaningful care looks like for a diverse ageing population is urgent, and so far, largely unanswered.

The Italian community choir in Fremantle has been answering that question every Friday morning for a few years now. It would be worth listening.

*Names have been changed.

Simone Marino, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Education; Adjunct Research Fellow, Social Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab, Edith Cowan University

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

Images of the sleek keels, elegant planks, and dragon-headed prows of Viking longships have been reproduced countless times on postcards, book covers, souvenirs and in television shows and movies.

These vessels are, quite literally, the poster-ships for the Viking Age, which was between around 750 and 1100 CE.

So what made these ships so special? And why were these advanced shipbuilding techniques so crucial to the Vikings’ success?

What drove this shipbuilding boom?

In Old Norse, there are two words for Viking: víkingr refers to a person, while víking is an activity. Neither word is inherently negative nor associated with violence.

A víkingr is someone (who may or may not identify as a pirate) who undertakes víking expeditions (sometimes to pillage, sometimes not), and whose life and livelihood have strong connections to the sea.

By the mid-eighth century, these people were keen to expand their horizons and branch out from local economies.

This coincided with a number of large and lucrative mercantile towns springing up around north-west Europe in this period.

Among other factors, Vikings travelled further westward and eastward as part of an ongoing and complex power grab for portable wealth, territory, and control of trade routes.

From the 750s on, the Vikings’ advanced shipbuilding technology helped give them the edge.

Gamechanging technology

The unique design of Viking ships and their trademark square sails were absolute gamechangers in this period.

There are many different types of Viking ship, but the most relevant here are the langskip (longship) and knörr (cargo ship).

Like all Viking vessels, these are clinker built. That means the hull’s long, curved sides are assembled out of slightly overlapping planks, and are held together by iron nails (the “clinkers”).

Along with their strong but slender keels and stems, this innovative construction made for incredibly flexible, light, and sinuous vehicles that could be powered by oars or by sail and withstand wild ocean swells.

With their narrow silhouettes and their ability to gently twist and yield to the waves, it’s no wonder longships were called snekkja (serpents), dreki (dragons) and skeið (sliders).

Another small but significant improvement that made longer-distance travel possible was the oar-hole.

Until the early Viking Age, pegs called tholepins stuck up from the gunwales (upper rim of the boat) to hold oars in place and act as fulcrums for rowing. This meant ships’ sides could never be very high above the water. (Imagine trying to row with your oar at head height.)

But by cutting holes through the side planks, which could be plugged when the oars were shipped and the sail raised, it became possible to build taller, more seaworthy ships.

The boats had shallow drafts (meaning not much of it was under the waterline). This enabled these “sea-snakes” to slither further inland than ever before, since they could tackle riverways other boats simply couldn’t navigate. They could also be dragged across land.

Longships also had symmetrical prows (meaning the “back” of the boat was just as high as the “front”).

This design allowed Viking raiders to pull right up on the riverbank, then “hit and run” – without all the slow awkwardness of reversing and turning the whole boat around for the getaway.

Square sails also increased both the distance and speed of Viking travel. Norse explorers like Eirik rauða (“the Red”) and his son Leif (who went to North America nearly 500 years before Columbus) wouldn’t have taken a warship to Iceland or Greenland.

Instead, they probably kitted out a knörr, a heavy-bellied merchant ship much like the one described in an ancient Icelandic text called Egil’s saga

richly painted above the plumbline and fitted with a black-and-red sail […] loaded with stockfish, hides and ermine, and a great quantity of squirrel skins and other furs […] a very valuable cargo.

When powered by four oars, a modern reconstruction of just such a knörr reached a speed of 1.5 knots. With the sail raised it sped along at 13 knots (around 24 km an hour).

A much larger longship with 60 oars could row at 4.5 knots and reach a maximum sailing speed of 17 knots (31.5 km an hour)!

Crafted by hand

The most impressive stats about Viking ships aren’t about how fast or far they went, but rather how much time, effort, and natural resources went into building them. The sheer industry of it all is astonishing.

Every piece was crafted by hand. Axes shaped the floor timbers, planking, masts and beams.

Dozens of oak trees (8-10 metres long and at least a metre across) went into the hull. Dozens more pine trees were burnt to make tar for sealing the wood (600 litres for a 60-oar longship, which took more than 2,000 hours to produce).

More pine and alderwood went into the oars and mast.

Then there’s all the iron: 450kg of it to make the 8,000 nails needed for this same longship.

An average knörr’s sail was 90m² (smaller than the longship’s) and used the wool of 200 sheep, all of which had to be spun into thread and woven into continuous lengths of fabric, each 65cm wide.

This spinning and weaving work took experimental historians 7,850 hours to recreate (around 4.5 years for one person).

Another month was needed to sew the sail panels together, cut it to shape and reinforce its edges. Then there’s the ship’s cordage: so much horsehair, hemp and linden bast (a plant fibre) for 3,000 metres of rope.

This constant and large-scale manufacturing paints an evocative picture of the Vikings’ everyday, shipbuilding life.

It was all hands on deck, so to speak.

Lisa Bennett, Associate Professor in Creative Writing and English Literature, Researcher in Old Norse Literature, Flinders University

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

It can be easy to think you get plenty of vitamin D when you live in a country bathed in sunshine, but the reality is more complicated.

Almost one in four Australian adults have vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D supplements are now one of the most commonly used complementary medicines.

So what is vitamin D? And do you need to take it as a supplement?

It functions like a hormone

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin that plays a crucial role in maintaining overall health. Unlike most vitamins, it functions more like a hormone in the body, and nearly every cell has a receptor for it.

It exists in several forms, but vitamin D3, also known as cholecalciferol, is the most important. Once in the body, D3 undergoes changes – first in the liver and then in the kidneys – to become its fully active form called calcitriol.

Your body is capable of producing its own vitamin D by converting a cholesterol precursor into it, but that requires exposure to ultraviolet radiation (UVB) on your skin.

You can also get it through diet from a few foods including eggs, oily fish and mushrooms – but it’s unlikely to be as much as you need.

What happens when you don’t get enough vitamin D?

Vitamin D’s best-known role is helping the body use calcium. It promotes the absorption of calcium from the gut, ensuring an adequate level in the blood for building strong bones.

Without sufficient vitamin D, your body can’t absorb calcium effectively, which can lead to bone health problems.

In children, severe deficiency causes rickets, a condition where bones become soft. This leads to delayed growth, bone pain, and skeletal conditions, such as bowed legs.

In adults, deficiency can cause a condition called osteomalacia. This results in bone pain, bone tenderness and a higher risk of fractures.

In the long term, low vitamin D contributes to osteoporosis by reducing bone density and increasing the risk of fractures, especially in older people.

Deficiency is also linked to muscle weakness and cramps, and impaired immune function, which results in a higher susceptibility to respiratory infections.

What can cause a vitamin D deficiency?

Insufficient sunlight exposure typically causes vitamin D deficiency.

If you spend all your time indoors, or you work night shifts and sleep during the day, you will get less sunlight exposure and make less vitamin D.

While we get generally get lots of sunlight in mainland Australia, there are regions that for long periods have very low sunlight which can also cause vitamin D deficiency. In very northern and southern latitudes, such as Tasmania, there are only a few hours of sunlight in winter.

For people living at these latitudes, they can not only have a vitamin D deficiency, but they may also suffer from a type of depression called seasonal affective disorder which has been linked to low vitamin D.

Melanin, or skin pigmentation, affects vitamin D production. People with darker skin and people with significant skin disorders, such as psoriasis or severe burns and scarring, can also be at risk of vitamin D deficiency.

Prescription vs over-the-counter supplements

There are various vitamin D supplements in Australia. There are low-dose (20 microgram) and higher-dose (175 microgram) formulations of vitamin D3. There is also a 0.25 microgram formulation of calcitriol, the active form of vitamin D.

Both of the vitamin D3 products are used for treating vitamin D deficiency, while the calcitriol product is used for treating hypocalcaemia (low calcium level) in people with chronic kidney disease.

The low dose vitamin D3 is taken daily whereas the higher dose formulation is taken once a week.

The higher-dose formulation is sold as a pharmacist-only medicine, meaning you’ll need to speak to a pharmacist before they are able to supply it to you.

The calcitriol vitamin D product is only available as a prescription medicine.

Vitamin D3 is also available in multivitamins at lower doses and in products that are combined with calcium or vitamin K.

Are there any dangers in taking vitamin D?

Vitamin D3 is generally well-tolerated. When taken daily, the upper tolerable intake level is 100 microgram.

A regular dose higher than 100 microgram for prolonged periods can cause excessive calcium absorption. This can result in nausea, vomiting, muscle weakness, loss of appetite, dehydration, excessive thirst and kidney stones.

On the flip side, excessive sunlight exposure will not cause vitamin D toxicity, but may increase your risk of skin cancer.

Vitamin D3 supplements may also interact with some cholesterol medications (statins) and alter those medicines’ level in your body.

There are also reports that suggest a potential interaction between vitamin D and a weight-loss medicine orlistat, interactions with steroids, and with the diuretic thiazide.

So do you need a supplement?

Most people only need five to 30 minutes of direct sunlight exposure, several times a week for their body to produce adequate vitamin D.

So unless there is a reason why you are not getting enough sunlight, or you have a skin condition, then you don’t need a supplement.

If you think you might need a supplement, your GP can order a blood test. There are also at-home test kits for vitamin D that have been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

If you are deficient, consult your local pharmacist who can recommend the right product and quantity for you based on your needs.

Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University; Ian Jamie, Senior Lecturer, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, and Wai-Jo Jocelin Chan, Pharmacist and Lecturer, UNSW Sydney; University of Sydney

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

Coles has been found to have misled its supermarket customers over discounts – and could now face hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties.

In a landmark case, Federal Court Justice Michael O'Bryan found 13 out of 14 sample sale tickets examined in the case had not offered genuine discounts, because Coles had not sold the products at a higher price for a reasonable period before promoting them with “Down Down” discounts.

In 2024, consumer watchdog the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced it was taking both of Australia’s biggest supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, to court. It alleged they had each offered hundreds of discounts that an “ordinary customer” might think were genuine, but which were misleading.

Coles and the ACCC have been given until May 29 to agree on penalties and other orders, including a possible donation to Foodbank. A separate class action against Coles by customers will also be dealt with at the same time. If they can’t agree, they will head back to court.

The maximum penalty in this case could be A$50 million per breach of consumer law, or more, which is why the total could stretch into hundreds of millions.

However, an appeal from Coles is still possible. Coles has said it’s “reviewing the judgement”.

Justice O'Bryan is set to rule on the case against Woolworths at a later date. Around two thirds of all Australian supermarket sales are made at Woolworths or Coles. So most Australians are likely to have seen some of the disputed “discounts” being fought over in these two cases.

This was a genuinely difficult decision for the Federal Court. Here’s why it will have huge ripple effects right across Australian retail – and petrol retailers in particular should be paying close attention.

Why it was a lineball decision

As Coles argued in defending itself, its “Down Down” discount tickets were strictly accurate in showing a “before” and “after” price.

However, the decision came down to whether “ordinary customers” might feel aggrieved that the discount did not really deliver the bargain they thought.

The case arose from the ACCC’s allegations that, between February 2022 and May 2023, Coles temporarily increased the price of at least 245 products, from toothpaste to cereal.

It then placed those products on “Down Down” promotions at prices that were the same – or higher – than the price of the products before the temporary price rise.

In his ruling, Justice O'Bryan recognised prices had also risen due to inflation. But he concluded that where the discount “Down Down” ticket referred to a previous price that had only recently been raised, shoppers would be misled about the bargain offered by the discount.

Effectively, this court decision accepts that ordinary customers would expect the “was” price to have been stable for a reasonable period – in this case, at least 12 weeks – for the advertised discount to be genuine and not misleading.

In the judge’s view, 12 weeks was an appropriate period to establish an ordinary price, as it matched Coles’ own internal policies in 2022.

The judge rejected Coles’ argument that inflation meant customers understood prices fluctuate. However, the judge did not find Coles had been shown to have artificially inflated prices. This matters, as it could potentially reduce how much the supermarket faces in future fines.

Huge news for shoppers and retailers

This decision is really significant. It means Australian retailers – not just supermarkets – cannot play games with consumers’ expectations.

If consumers have been led to understand a marketing campaign is directing them to good deals, then that has to be a genuine deal, which takes into account the price customers have been paying over a longer period – not just a temporary discount right beforehand.

For retailers, the decision means they’ll need to take greater care in their marketing. They need to consider whether the overall impression created by a discount campaign matches the reality of what is being offered, and whether it could mislead an ordinary shopper.

Why it matters for Woolworths

The ACCC has also brought a case against Woolworths – Australia’s biggest supermarket – on very similar grounds.

It’s worth noting the Woolworths case in court is slightly different from Coles’ – so we can’t assume the same result.

But Woolworths must at this point be considering its options – including whether settling now, and agreeing on a penalty, may be a smarter choice than waiting for its day in court before the same judge, Justice O'Bryan.

Why it matters for consumer protection

This was a high-stakes case for the ACCC. And it’s a welcome confirmation of the Australian Consumer Law being “fundamental” protective legislation for all Australians.

Just this week, the watchdog was given another $67.7 million over four years in the federal budget to strengthen its competition and consumer law enforcement capabilities.

The ACCC is celebrating its win in court, with its chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb saying “this case has increased transparency and accountability in relation to Coles’ Down Down program”.

The watchdog will now be feeling more confident in its judgement about marketing practices that should not be tolerated.

Much of the new federal funding for the ACCC is to monitor petrol pricing. So petrol retailers in particular should take heed about truth in advertising tied to fuel price fluctuations.

All retailers are now on notice.

Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne

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

Every day, hundreds of trucks barrel along highways from Melbourne to Brisbane. Some B-triple trucks stretch to 36 metres or more, more than seven times the length of an average car.

Australia relies on those largely diesel-fuelled trucks for the vast majority of our intercity freight.

More trucks are on the way. Infrastructure Australia predicts “large increases in road freight are expected for Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth” – especially in Melbourne, home to Australia’s busiest cargo port.

As the recent global oil shock has shown, Australia’s reliance on road freight leaves the nation vulnerable to global oil supply problems.

Yet the federal government has just dumped the northern half of the Inland Rail project, connecting Parkes in central New South Wales to near Brisbane.

The axing came after the cost of the whole 1,600 kilometre project was forecast to exceed A$45 billion – more than four times the original budget.

But with Inland Rail not proceeding to Queensland, what does the future of rail freight on Australia’s east coast look like? And does this risk leaving the nation dependent on road freight for decades more?

Inland Rail’s problems and potential

Just three years ago, the Albanese government re-committed to building Inland Rail. Construction had already started in 2018 under then prime minister Scott Morrison, with the project overseen by the government’s Australian Rail Track Corporation.

Labor’s commitment followed an independent review in 2023 by Dr Kerry Schott, who found Inland Rail was “late and over budget”.

Yet the independent review still concluded Inland Rail was “an important project”, which was “needed to meet the increasing national freight task”.

The review said Inland Rail was expected to take around 200,000 trucks off the road each year, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 750,000 tonnes a year by 2050. It was also expected to boost regional communities in NSW and Queensland.

Last week, one regional Queensland business said scrapping the northern leg of Inland Rail was “a disaster”.

Why rail freight has declined for decades

Since the 1990s, all Australian highways have been upgraded to handle larger, heavier trucks.

Over the same period, there have been only limited improvements to rail freight. Not surprisingly, much freight that used to go by rail now goes by road.

As an example, back in 1994-95, rail carried about 28% of freight on Australia’s busiest freight corridor between Melbourne and Sydney.

By 2024, rail carried just 2% of freight between the two cities.

Inland Rail was meant to take pressure off highways

The Newell Highway is NSW’s longest highway, reaching from the Victorian border at Tocumwal to Queensland’s border at Goondiwindi. It’s currently the main means of moving freight between Melbourne and Brisbane.

Truck movements on the Newell Highway come with many costs. As well as road maintenance costs and the significant costs of ongoing highway upgrades, there are the very real human costs of road crashes.

In the past two years alone, there have been three fatal crashes involving trucks and semi-trailers: in July 2024, September 2025 and January this year. Five people died in those crashes.

Roads and city rail get a better deal

Only days after scrapping the northern half of Inland Rail, the federal government announced it would spend another $3.8 billion on Melbourne’s controversial Suburban Rail Loop. That new funding – ahead of November’s state election – takes the federal contribution to $6 billion over four years.

Other suburban train projects have also won federal funding, such as $5.2 billion towards a Western Sydney Airport Metro and $4.87 billion for Perth’s Metronet urban rail.

Road projects consistently do even better, such as more than $10 billion in federal funds to upgrade Queensland’s Bruce Highway or $15 billion in federal and state funding for a past upgrade of the Pacific Highway.

$2.8 billion for rail freight doesn’t cut it

In place of completing the Inland Rail project, the federal government promised to reallocate $1.75 billion towards other interstate rail track, on top of another $1 billion previously announced. That’s less than $2.8 billion for upgrades on a 9,600km national rail network.

That funding will include track renewal, passing loop extensions and improved signalling to remove speed restrictions on the rail network between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. There will also be some upgrades in flood-prone parts of the east-west rail corridor to Perth.

It’s far from what’s actually needed, especially for interstate rail lines waiting on much-needed track upgrades. Priority areas I’ve long argued need funding include:

• a more direct route between Macarthur and Cootamundra in NSW, cutting two hours off freight train times and speeding up passenger train journeys

• securing a corridor now for a less winding track between Macarthur and Mittagong in NSW

• two key bypasses north of Sydney, around Newcastle and Karuah Valley, which would jointly cut around an hour off train trips.

Along with upgrades like those, if Australia wants to be able to reduce its reliance on road freight, a future government will have to revisit completing the northern half of Inland Rail.

Without Inland Rail reaching Queensland, we won’t get as much benefit back from upgrading inland freight tracks from Melbourne to central NSW, underway now.

Our current approach to transport funding favours roads and urban rail projects. Rail freight – which gets trucks off the road and better connects our regional communities with our cities – keeps being shortchanged.

Until we strike a better balance, we will continue to be as vulnerable to future oil shocks as we are today.

Philip Laird, Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Wollongong

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

Australia’s Health Minister Mark Butler has declared reducing specialists’ fees will be his next key focus of health policy reform.

Doctors are currently free to set their own fees and many have rapidly increased them over the past 15 years. The average out-of-pocket cost for a non-bulk billed specialist consultation increased from A$46 in 2009–10 to $126 in 2024–25, or 11.9% per year. These are averages, so actual fees can be much higher and vary by specialty.

As a result, non-GP specialists have the highest incomes in the country and run the most profitable businesses.

So what has the government done so far to get specialist fees under control? And what options are left for reform?

Starting the reform process

This year the government introduced legislation to enable the publication of fees for individual specialists. The Medical Cost Finder website will show what individual specialists charge, rather than regional averages. This will better facilitate choice of doctor.

A Senate committee has also been set up to investigate access to and affordability of medical specialists which will report in late 2026.

The committee is likely to hear that high fees, and uncertainty about what fee will be charged, means people are less likely to attend appointments. This can mean a choice between poor health and potential financial hardship.

Each year, almost 1 million people report avoiding seeing specialists because of the cost.

High fees also skew incentives for doctors who may prefer to work in high-fee specialties rather than in specialties where population needs are higher, further reducing access for populations in greatest need.

Can’t we just increase competition?

Economists argue more competition in the market can help reduce market power and reduce fees.

However, our research has shown more competition (measured by more specialists of the same specialty in an area) has no impact on fees.

Increasing the supply of specialists might increase competition. But this already occurred in the 2000s when the number of medical graduates doubled and the number of specialists increased exponentially.

However, fees continued to rise higher and faster than inflation.

Competition can also be increased through more consumer information and choice, the focus of the current legislation.

However, our research and review of previous studies suggests fee transparency through the government’s existing Medical Cost Finder may not work, unless GPs have this information available during consultations when referring patients. Even then, patients have no objective information on quality.

Patients don’t have the same information or knowledge as doctors about diagnosis or which treatments provide most value. More information for patients won’t necessarily address this, as patients don’t have medical degrees to interpret it.

Patients may also be vulnerable, and motivated by fear and hope, and not in a position to make clear and rational decisions.

Four options for reining in fees

If increasing competition can’t bring fees down, the only options are direct fee regulation, additional government spending, or both. This could involve:

1. Legally enforceable price caps

Doctors have traditionally relied on a clause in the constitution to argue against direct regulation of fees. But the minister seems willing to legally test this. And doctors have lost previous legal tests of this clause.

Direct fee controls could make it illegal to charge above a certain amount, and caps could vary by individual Medicare items or by episode of care.

An independent body could be established to set these caps and Medicare rebates, based on submitted evidence on how costs vary across regions and patients’ needs. However, doctors with fees below the caps could increase them.

2. Pay Medicare rebates only if fees are below a certain cap

An alternative to testing the constitution is to make the payment of Medicare rebates conditional on doctors charging a fee below a certain cap.

If doctors charged above the cap, this would remove the Medicare rebate for patients so could potentially increase out-of-pocket costs for patients.

Since some patients regard higher fees as an indicator of high quality, this increased out-of-pocket cost might not reduce demand for everyone.

Some very high-fee doctors would not change their fees at all and the services they provide would become fully private. Skewed incentives would remain.

3. Increase Medicare rebates

Doctors groups argue that Medicare rebates should be increased, as this would lower fees charged.

However, previous experience with the Medicare Safety Net found strong evidence doctors may not reduce fees but, rather, take the extra rebate, or a proportion of it, as extra income.

This could reduce the growth of fees but discretion remains with the doctor on what to charge and the out-of-pocket cost.

This could be combined with fee caps or rules that prevent doctors from increasing fees if they accept the higher rebate. This would guarantee that the rebate increase would reduce out-of-pocket costs.

4. Standardising gap cover arrangements across health insurers

For services provided in private hospitals (and to private patients in public hospitals), health insurers use gap cover arrangements to help keep out-of-pocket costs down.

Doctors who choose to have an agreement with a health insurer can then choose whether a patient pays any out-of-pocket costs if their fee is equal to or less than the fee schedule determined by health insurers.

Patients can pay no out-of-pocket cost (“no gap” cover) or a known out-of-pocket cost (“known gap” cover) or pay the full out-of-pocket cost if the fee is above the known gap amount. Each insurer uses a different fee schedule which adds to the variation in out-of-pocket costs.

This scheme could be strengthened and fee variations reduced by requiring all insurers to use the same fee schedule.

It could also be mandated that all doctors accept the insurers’ fee as full payment.

Where to next?

These options require careful thought to determine which might be more effective in reducing fees and out-of-pocket costs. Some involve further government spending or impose costs on health insurers, while others involve changes in legislation and rules.

Some combination of both is likely to make this work. But reducing out-of-pocket costs while maintaining doctors’ earnings is likely to be expensive.

Anthony Scott, Professor of Health Economics and Director, Centre for Health Economics, Monash Business School, Monash University

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

Governments have spent about a year announcing new policies to make early education safer for Australian children.

In the wake of reports of shocking abuse and neglect in daycare centres, there have been moves to improve training and screening of educators, as well as more centre inspections.

All of these measures have been implemented in response to a crisis. Amid significant community concern about childcare safety, early childhood experts and peak bodies have also been calling for a commission to drive long-term strategic reform.

Ahead of the 2026 federal budget, Education Minister Jason Clare announced plans for a new national commission for early education and care. He told reporters, the idea is

to build on the safety reforms that we’ve already implemented, and help to make sure that the system works better than it does today.

If designed well, there is potential to go beyond addressing the immediate crisis. A national commission could fundamentally reshape the early childhood sector.

What has been announced?

Before anyone gets too excited, the commission is still at the “consideration” stage. The federal government says it will consult with state governments and stakeholders about how a commission would work.

This follows a 2024 Productivity Commission report, which recommended a national independent early education and care commission. The report noted while there are a number of government entities and peak bodies across the sector, “there is no dedicated body that monitors the system’s performance against its objectives”.

It said a new commission should be an independent watchdog and evidence hub, to complement current regulatory efforts at both national and state levels.

In 2023, the South Australian Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care similarly noted the need for a national long-term vision for the sector.

What could a commission do?

The safety and quality problems we are seeing right now cannot be addressed through tighter regulation alone.

Current concerns around safety and quality are tied to the sector’s ongoing workforce challenges.

This includes concerns about workforce shortages, pay and conditions, training quality, heavy workloads, and educator wellbeing.

A national commission could focus on how all these issues connect – and impact on child safety and education quality. It could gather consistent data to inform long-term planning, monitor progress against national commitments, and provide governments with independent advice that cuts across jurisdictional boundaries.

What is needed to make this work?

To be effective, the commission would need to be legislated, independent and adequately resourced.

The Productivity Commission report noted a commission could hold governments to account for the performance of the sector. Professor Deborah Brennan, associate commissioner of the 2024 Productivity Commission inquiry, has also called for a commission to “give detailed consideration to the most effective ways to expand not-for-profit provision”. This call is grounded in evidence that large for-profit services tend to provide lower quality education and care.

The commission would also need to cover the entire sector, across all service and provider types and all jurisdictions. This includes private, public, not-for-profit and for-profit services. It requires a clear mandate, particularly in how it would interact with other government bodies and support national data collection.

If it is going to work – and use the best information available – it also needs to meaningfully involve educators’ experiences and voices.

What now?

Establishing a commission is not the entire answer. There is also an urgent need to improve educator-child ratios. And educators need to be paid and treated like professionals who provide quality early childhood education and keep children safe. If given the right powers and within its mandate, a commission could support these goals.

Done right, a national commission could represent a genuine shift from reactive policy and “bandaid solutions” to a long-term, whole-of-system vision for a sector more than one million families depend on every day.

Erin Harper, Lecturer, School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney and Marianne Fenech, Professor, Early Childhood Governance, University of Sydney

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

Frozen shoulder can make simple tasks – such as lifting your arm, sleeping on your side, getting out of bed, putting on a bra, driving or playing with your kids – painful and challenging.

This condition usually starts with pain suddenly developing in the shoulder and stiffness. Over time, the pain and stiffness get worse. It can drag on for months or even years.

So, what causes frozen shoulder? And can it be treated?

What is frozen shoulder?

This shoulder condition, also known as “adhesive capsulitis”, affects around 8% of men and 10% of women aged 25–64. But it’s more common over 40, especially for people in their 60s.

We don’t fully understand what causes frozen shoulder.

The tissues around the joint become tight, swollen and stiff. But we don’t know exactly why these changes occur and lead to pain and limited movement.

There are usually three stages:

• freezing – pain gradually gets worse and the shoulder becomes stiff, limiting the range of movement

• frozen – stiffness and pain usually peak, but may begin to ease

• thawing – pain and stiffness slowly improve, and movement begins to return.

While health professionals commonly accept it, this staged description suggests frozen shoulder will follow a predictable pattern and always get better on its own. But research suggests this is not always the case.

For example, the “freezing” stage is usually expected to last at least ten weeks. But some people will start to notice improved movement sooner.

Recovery stages will vary from person to person and can take months to years. Some people may not fully recover, even with treatment.

One 2020 study followed up with 215 patients with frozen shoulder. While over 70% of participants said they were happy with improvements in their symptoms, around 40% still had some movement restriction two years after their symptoms began.

Another study from 2008 found over a third of people they surveyed (41%) had ongoing symptoms two to seven years later, including pain and difficulty sleeping.

Who is most at risk?

Certain groups are more likely to develop frozen shoulder:

• women, especially during menopause
• people with diabetes
• older adults
• those with high cholesterol or thyroid problems.

There is some evidence genetics also plays a role, as a family history increases your risk.

But we need more high-quality research to understand what’s behind these risk factors.

For example, people with diabetes are around five times more likely to develop frozen shoulder than those without diabetes – and also have worse pain. This may be linked to diabetes-related changes in the body, such as reduced blood flow to tissues and chemical changes from high blood sugar. But the exact mechanisms are unclear, and research is yet to determine whether controlling blood sugar better could help prevent or slow frozen shoulder.

Similarly, women are 40% more likely to develop frozen shoulder than men, with one theory suggesting hormone fluctuations during menopause are responsible. But there is no clear evidence yet to support this.

How is frozen shoulder treated?

There is mixed evidence about which treatments are effective, including whether over-the-counter pain medication such as Voltaren helps.

Oral steroids

A review of the evidence suggests oral steroids, such as prednisolone, can provide some short-term pain relief and improve shoulder movement, compared to doing nothing or a placebo. But these benefits don’t seem to last beyond six weeks, and the evidence comes from a few small studies. These require a prescription.

Injections

High-quality evidence shows corticosteroid injections can provide short-term relief, compared to doing nothing.

There is also some limited evidence that corticosteroid injections and platelet rich plasma injections can provide better short-term pain relief, compared with over-the-counter pain relief and physiotherapy. However, the studies are small or poorly designed and the effects are small, so the evidence needs to be interpreted with caution.

Physiotherapy

Moderate-quality evidence suggests physiotherapy can help improve shoulder movement. Benefits of physio are greater when combined with a steroid injection, and followed up by doing the exercises at home. More research is needed to understand how well these treatments work in the long term.

What about surgery?

There are two main procedures for frozen shoulder, both done while the patient is unconscious under anaesthetic.

1. Manipulation under anaesthetic

This is a less invasive procedure where the surgeon stretches the shoulder, without cutting into the joint, to help loosen tight tissue that may be causing stiffness.

2. Arthroscopic capsular release

In this type of keyhole surgery, the surgeon cuts tight tissues inside the shoulder joint to try to free up shoulder movement.

Improvements from these procedures are typically small, and evidence suggests the results are not better than non-surgical treatments. For example, one study showed that after one year, patients who’d had surgery had similar improvements to those who’d had physiotherapy and a steroid injection, but no surgery.

These procedures also have several downsides. It’s more expensive than other treatments, carries additional risks, and typically requires weeks (and up to three months) of rehabilitation.

The bottom line

Being physically active and doing exercises can help if you’re experiencing pain and limited movement. But you don’t have to work this out alone. It’s a good idea to get advice on managing pain and how to stay active.

If you suspect you have frozen shoulder, it’s important to see a doctor or physiotherapist so they can rule out other conditions, such as fracture and arthritis.

A health professional can also discuss management – the potential benefits, harms, costs, and how easy it is to access each treatment option.

Fernando Sousa, Research Fellow in Physiotherapy, Monash University; Joshua Zadro, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, University of Sydney, and Peter Malliaras, Professor in Physiotherapy, Monash University

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

Teenagers lead busy lives.

And to get through everything from school exams to softball games, they need nutritious food.

But research suggests Australian teens aren’t getting the nutrients they need, because their diets often revolve around sugary, salty and processed foods.

So what’s behind this? And how can we help our teens eat better?

The teenage years

Adolescence is a crucial time of growth and development.

During this time, teenagers go through various physical changes. They generally double their body weight and go through a growth spurt. They also experience rapid hormonal changes, as the adolescent brain pumps out more hormones related to growth, stress and sexual development.

At the same time, they are dealing with various social and emotional pressures. This includes their growing desire to be independent which may involve distancing themselves from – or in some cases actively rebelling against – their family values. They may also develop new friendships, juggling these with other commitments such as schoolwork and sport.

Good nutrition helps teens navigate all these changes. However, research suggests teenagers aren’t eating enough healthy foods.

What teens are eating

Australian teenagers get, on average, around 35% of their daily energy from nutrient-poor, energy-dense foods. These include confectionery, processed meats and salty snacks. Young Australians also consume a lot of sweetened drinks, such as soft drinks and energy drinks. On average, teens have sugary drinks at least once a week.

Compared to other age groups, adolescents are the least likely to eat the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables – two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables each day. Worryingly, only 4% of teenagers meet that recommendation.

Worse still, globally roughly one-third of teenagers can’t access enough food. This may be because they live in regions affected by poverty, conflict or climate change.

One 2022 study examined the eating habits of students aged between 11 and 18, across 95 countries. It found up to 30% had experienced food insecurity – meaning they couldn’t access enough safe and nutritious food – in the last month. This study also suggested a link between food insecurity and reduced school attendance and physical activity, as well as poorer mental health.

Not just ‘bad choices’

So why are teenagers choosing unhealthy foods over healthy ones?

They are not simply making bad choices. So criticising their eating habits will only harm their relationship with food, and may contribute to feelings of shame and low self-esteem.

Research suggests teenagers make food choices based on various factors.

One is relationships. As teenagers grow and mature, they spend less time with their family and more time with their peers. As a result, their food choices are increasingly shaped by what their friends eat. Research suggests teenagers’ food choices are also influenced by where they socialise, such as fast food restaurants. The price of food also matters, with teenagers more likely to eat unhealthy foods because they are cheaper.

Another factor is social trends. Research suggests targeted advertising and celebrity endorsements have a disproportionate impact on adolescent food choices. And they mainly promote convenient, nutrient-poor options such as fast food and confectionery. Food trends, many of which are driven by social media, may also influence what teenagers eat. Recent examples include microwave-friendly mug cakes and the TikTok-famous “girl dinner”, both of which generally have little nutritional value.

Teenagers also care about taste. It goes without saying, junk food is delicious. That’s because food companies design it in a way that taps into our cravings, making us eat more. Research suggests teenagers may struggle to resist or stop eating unhealthy foods because they haven’t fully learnt to control their appetites. Advertising exacerbates this by framing unhealthy food as the most delicious and convenient option.

Raising healthier teens

The good news is, we can help our teens eat more nutritious foods. But that requires action on both a policy and household level.

In policy

Unfortunately, we tend to overlook teenagers in nutrition research and policy. Our new global framework for adolescent nutrition aims to change that. With help from young people and international nutrition experts, we developed several key recommendations:

• boost nutrition education in schools, by establishing a national school curriculum to safely promote healthy eating and combat nutrition misinformation from social media
• increase access to healthy, affordable foods by providing or subsidising healthy school meals, expanding community food programs in places where teenagers hang out such as sporting clubs and supporting local produce markets
• regulate how companies market unhealthy foods to young people, by restricting teen-directed advertising in apps and gaming platforms and banning unhealthy food marketing near schools, sporting fields and on public transport.

At home

There are also practical ways parents and families can help teenagers eat more healthily.

Here are some ideas:

• make your teen the “cook of the day”, assigning them one day each week where they choose and/or cook a nutritious meal that helps build their cooking skills
• involve your teen in meal planning, encouraging them to brainstorm healthy meals that are also tasty and affordable
• eat shared meals, ideally as a family and without any devices.

As policymakers, we must make healthy foods more visible, convenient and affordable for teenagers. And as parents, we shouldn’t shame teens for their eating habits, but instead show them how fun and achievable healthy eating can be. Together, these actions will help our teenagers grow into healthy, active adults.

Catharine Fleming, Senior Lecturer in Public Health, Western Sydney University

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

General practitioners (GPs) and hospital doctors are usually the first contact point for patients, but as our new research shows, they can take on different roles, acting either as gatekeepers or brokers.

As gatekeepers they make sure unnecessary investigations are avoided and scarce resources used efficiently. As brokers, they advocate for their patients’ access to the limited resources available.

For people living with life-limiting disease, the role a doctor adopts can mean the difference between timely care and dangerous delay.

Our research focused on people who had lived with a terminal cancer diagnosis for a long time. The impact of these different roles can be seen clearly.

When GPs were concerned a person’s symptoms could indicate cancer, most patients were referred to specialist services quickly so diagnostic work could be undertaken.

But there were also cases where patients, even with a history of cancer, were not referred quickly. There are several reasons why this might occur.

One is that the GP thinks the patient’s symptoms are due to a different condition. For example, one of the people in our study had a history of breast cancer, but also of mental health issues. When they presented with breathlessness, their GP prescribed an antidepressant.

The breathlessness persisted and the patient returned to the GP and eventually ended up in the emergency department where they were diagnosed with lung metastases.

Another patient had a lump on her breast ten years after breast cancer. Her GP said it was a cyst, and it was not until she saw a female doctor that she was sent to her specialist to find the cancer had metastasised.

Even in the hospital sector resources could be withheld from patients.

One study participant was found to have a terminal brain tumour and was sent home and told treatment would be “a waste of time”. It was only due to the tenacity of their spouse that the patient was eventually sent for possible treatment.

Doctors as advocates

In contrast, for some patients a health professional will broker access to resources others might not be given.

Again, reasons for this vary, but can often come down to some assessment about who is worthy of this extra effort.

One of the patients we spoke to had malignant melanoma that had been misdiagnosed years earlier as benign. Their specialist went in to bat for them, working to get them onto a vaccine trial, trying to make up for that system failure.

Another patient, a medical professional, was one of only 100 people in New Zealand put on an unsubsidised medication at no cost to them. Yet another, who was in their 30s, was placed on a number of trials for melanoma, even in circumstances where they did not meet the trial protocol.

We can see some clear reasons why a health professional may broker access to scarce resources for their patient. The patient may have been let down by the health system earlier, they may have strong connections with the health system because of their work, and they may be regarded as being more worthy because of their age.

There will be many other factors, but we have no systematic research on this issue. What we do have, though, is a situation where health professionals are making determinations about who is worthy of access to resources.

These decisions are not mere judgements about need or likely clinical benefits.

Reinforcing existing inequities

For Māori, gatekeeping and brokering may have very different effects.

Gatekeeping may not be malicious but can reproduce the experience of later diagnosis and poorer outcomes, which is already more common for Māori.

Māori are also less likely to start with the advantages that make a patient “broker-worthy”. If brokerage is informal and discretionary, it risks reinforcing inequities the system nominally wants to reduce.

A third role we saw was less about tests and treatments and more about what kinds of knowledge and practice are allowed into the clinic. Some practitioners acted as boundary enforcers, defending the edge of Western evidence-based medicine by excluding or ignoring other approaches to cancer and healing.

One patient in our study rejected Western medicine, concluding that doctors did not listen to them or understand their cultural and spiritual world.

GPs and hospital specialists will always have to balance finite resources, uncertain evidence and competing obligations. But whether they primarily act as gatekeepers, brokers, boundary enforcers or as bridge builders across these roles has real consequences for who is diagnosed, who is treated, and who lives well with cancer in Aotearoa.

For Māori, whose cancer journeys are already shaped by structural inequity, getting those roles right is not an abstract policy debate. It is a matter of life and death.

We need to understand medical practitioners’ decisions about which role they take on. This knowledge may help patients to advocate for themselves and researchers to analyse whether these decisions are fostering equitable outcomes.

Kevin Dew, Professor of Sociology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Chris Cunningham, Professor of Māori and Public Health, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University; Elizabeth Dennett, Associate Professor of Surgery, University of Otago; Kerry Chamberlain, Professor of Social and Health Psychology, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University, and Richard Egan, Associate Professor of Health Promotion, University of Otago

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

As of May 8 end-to-end encryption is no longer available on direct messages on Instagram.

Meta, in announcing the policy reversal, said it had done so because few people used the feature. But this has raised questions about its impact on user privacy and whether it will improve child safety on the platform.

Instagram has long been a focal point for discussion about online safety – whether in relation to body image concerns, cyberbullying or sexual extortion. This policy change by Meta directly affects how safety and moderation are implemented in private messages.

This is important considering research has found that perpetrators first contacted roughly 23% of Australian sexual extortion victims on Instagram, the second most frequent method of contact, behind Snapchat (at 50%).

What is end-to-end encryption?

End-to-end encryption is a way of scrambling a message so only the sender’s and recipient’s devices can read it. The platform carrying the message, in this case Instagram, can’t access it.

This same technology is present by default on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and (since late 2023) Facebook Messenger.

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg first promised to bring end-to-end encryption across Meta’s messaging products back in 2019, under the slogan “the future is private”.

Instagram tested encrypted direct messages in 2021. It rolled them out as an opt-in feature in 2023.

End-to-end encrypted direct messages never became the default, and the low adoption rate of opting in to use the feature is Meta’s justification for removing it. As a spokesperson told The Guardian:

Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram.

There is a circular logic to this: Meta has killed off a feature it buried so deep that most users never knew it existed, then cited low usage as the reason for its removal.

What does this mean for Instagram users?

In practical terms, every message you send on Instagram now travels in a form Meta can read.

Meta’s privacy policy lists the content of messages users send and receive among the data it collects. In principle, this enables the company to use this data to personalise features, train artificial intelligence (AI) models, and deliver targeted advertising.

While Meta has publicly committed not to train its AI models on private messages unless users actively share them with Meta AI, it has made no equivalent public commitment about advertising.

That leaves open the possibility that Meta could use unencrypted Instagram direct messages for ad targeting. And without encryption, Meta’s AI commitment is now backed by policy alone, not by the technology itself.

A clear reversal

This reads as a clear reversal of Meta’s privacy-first posture which Zuckerberg announced seven years ago.

Meta has been under sustained pressure from law enforcement, regulators and child protection organisations who argue end-to-end encryption creates spaces where platforms can’t detect child sexual exploitation and grooming. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has been clear that the deployment of end-to-end encryption “does not absolve services of responsibility for hosting or facilitating online abuse or the sharing of illegal content”.

This argument deserves to be taken seriously. The harms are real and disproportionately fall on young people.

However, sexual extortion research shows perpetrators don’t tend to stay on the platform where they make first contact, with more than 50% of sexual extortion victims saying perpetrators asked them to switch platforms.

Meta still uses end-to-end encryption on its other platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and it needs to apply a consistent approach to child safety. Predators routinely ask victims to switch platforms, so the company’s safety approach needs to work for Instagram and their end-to-end encrypted services.

A false choice

Meta and privacy advocates often frame this as a choice between end-to-end encryption or child safety. But that’s a false choice. It’s not an “either-or” situation, even if they make it sound like one.

The technology already exists to detect harmful content while keeping messages encrypted in transit. It just has to run in the right place: on the user’s device, before the device encrypts and sends the message, or after it receives and decrypts it.

On-device approaches have a contested history, and any deployment must be genuinely privacy-preserving by design. But technology companies must weigh the objection against the harms that continue to occur. A safety by design approach is needed.

On-device safety measures have been demonstrated at scale with Apple’s on-device nudity detection for images sent or received via Messages, AirDrop and FaceTime. A 2025 study demonstrated high-accuracy grooming detection using Meta’s AI model designed specifically for on-device deployment on mobile phones.

Recently, both Apple and Google have started to take measures towards app store–based age verification in some jurisdictions.

The highest-profile real-world deployment of these is Apple enabling device-level privacy-preserving age verification in the UK.

Social media and private messaging companies, along with operating system vendors (Microsoft, Apple, and Google), all have a role to play in ensuring harmful content is detected, whether or not end-to-end encryption is used. Progress has been slow. But we, as a community, need to demand more from these companies.

Joel Scanlan, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Law; Academic Co-Lead, CSAM Deterrence Centre, University of Tasmania

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

We have been on a years-long campaign of satellite remote sensing of the vast desert landscapes in Eastern Sudan.

This involved using satellite aerial imagery to systematically and painstakingly search for archaeological features in Atbai Desert of Eastern Sudan, a small part of the much larger Sahara.

Our team – which includes archaeologists from Macquarie University, France’s HiSoMA research unit, and the Polish Academy of Sciences – wanted to tell the story of this desert region between the Nile and the Red Sea, without having to excavate.

One mysterious archaeological feature stood out. We kept finding large, circular mass graves filled with the bones of people and animals, often carefully arranged around a key person at the centre.

Likely built around the fourth and third millennia BCE, all these “enclosure burial” monuments have a large round enclosure wall, some up to 80 metres in diameter, with humans and their cattle, sheep and goats buried inside.

Our new research, published in the journal African Archaeological Review, reveals how we found 260 previously unknown enclosure burials east of the Nile River, across almost 1,000km of desert.

Who built them?

Already known from a few excavated examples in the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts, these large circular burial monuments have long puzzled scholars.

What seemed once isolated examples emerge now as a consistent pattern. It is suggestive of a common nomadic culture stretching across a vast stretch of desert.

Most are within the borders of modern Sudan on the slopes of the Red Sea Hills. Unfortunately, satellite imagery alone cannot communicate the whole story of these enclosure burial builders.

The carbon dates and pottery from the few excavated monuments tell us these people lived roughly 4000–3000 BCE, just before Egyptians formed a territorial kingdom we know of as Pharaonic Egypt.

But these “enclosure burial” nomads had little to do with urbane and farming Egyptians.

Living in the desert and raising herds, these were Saharan desert nomads through and through.

A new elite?

Some enclosures show “secondary” burials arranged around a “primary” burial of a person at the centre – perhaps a chief or other important member of the community.

For archaeologists, this is important data for discerning class and hierarchy in prehistoric societies.

The question of when Saharan nomads became less egalitarian has plagued archaeologists for decades, but most agree it was around this time of the fourth millennium BCE that a distinctive “elite” class emerged.

This is still a far cry from the sort of huge divisions between ruler and ruled as seen in societies such as Egypt, with its pharaohs and farmers. However, it ushers in the first traces of inequality.

Animals held in high esteem

Cattle seem very important to these prehistoric nomads (a theory also supported by ancient local rock art in the area).

Burying themselves alongside their herd, these nomads show they held their animals in esteem.

Thousands of years later, local nomads chose to reuse these now “ancient” enclosures for their burial plots – sometimes almost 4,000 years after they were first built.

In other words, the prehistoric nomads created cemetery spaces that lasted for millennia.

What happened to these people?

No one can say for sure.

The few dates we have for these monuments cluster between 4000–3000 BCE, nearing the end of a period when the once-greener Sahara was drying, a phase scientists call the “African Humid Period”.

From north to south, the summer monsoon gradually retreated, reducing rainfall and shrinking pastures. This led nomads to abandon thirsty cattle, increase the mobility of their herds, migrate to the south or flee to the Nile.

The monuments are overwhelmingly located near what were then favourable watering spots; near rocky pools in valley floors, lakebeds and ephemeral rivers.

This tells us that when the monuments were being built, the desert was already quite challenging and dry.

At some point, as grass and bush made way for sand and rocks, keeping their prized cattle became unsustainable.

Having large herds of cattle in this desert, at this period, may have been a way of showing off an expensive and rare possession – a prehistoric nomad’s equivalent to having a Ferrari. This may help explain why cattle were frequently buried alongside their owners in enclosure burial monuments.

A bigger story

These enclosure burials are only one part of the greater story of human adaptation to climate change across North Africa.

From the Central Sahara, to Kenya and Arabia, keeping cattle, goats and sheep transformed societies. It changed the food they ate, the way they moved around, and community hierarchies.

It’s no coincidence communities changed how they buried their dead at the same time as they adopted herding lifestyles.

These burial enclosures tell us even scattered nomads were extremely well-organised people, and expert adapters.

Our discovery reshapes the story of the Sahara deserts and the prehistory of the Nile.

They provide a prologue for the monumentalism of the kingdoms of Egypt and Nubia, and an image of this region as more than pharaohs, pyramids and temples.

Sadly, many of these enclosure monuments are currently being destroyed or vandalised as a result of unregulated mining in the region. These unique burials have survived for millennia, but can disappear in less than a week.

Maria Gatto (Polish Academy of Sciences) was an author on our paper. We also want to acknowledge Alexander Carter, Tung Cheung, Kahn Emerson, Jessica Larkin, Stuart Hamilton and Ethan Simpson from Macquarie University for their contribution. We are also grateful to the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (Sudan).

Julien Cooper, Lecturer, Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University; Maël Crépy, Researcher in Geography and Ancient History, Université Lumière Lyon 2 , and Marie Bourgeois, PhD Candidate, Ancient History, Université Lumière Lyon 2

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

Every few years, media comes alive with discussion and debate around the use of technology in pop music, often focused on that most personal of instruments – the human voice.

Vocal manipulation is nothing new. It is ubiquitous and fundamental to pop music production – from self-harmonising on records in the 1950s, to autotune technology in the 90s and now millisecond precise editing, combining hundreds of individual vocal performances at the syllable level.

Generative AI is now prevalent in music as well. The use of platforms such as Suno are hugely popular. Suno can clone a voice within minutes. This can then be used to automatically generate a song with your voice, no matter how in tune or technically capable it originally was.

It can also take existing voices and remap them to other tunes. For example, take this mashup (below) of Cotton Eye Joe, “sung” by a digital Amy Winehouse.

But with the advent of this technology, is there a threshold of achievement before the individual voice is manipulated so much it is effectively removed altogether?

Here are six songs that exemplify how evolving technologies have changed the human voice since the 1950s.

1. Buddy Holly – Words of Love (1957)

The technique of double tracking takes two separate recordings of the voice and plays them together.

This simple technique, only achievable with the creative application of advances in recording technology in the 50s, gives the impression of a “thicker” vocal.

In Words of Love, Buddy Holly went one step further and harmonised with himself. It is a technique that is still used in modern production, by pioneering musicians like Imogen Heap.

2. The Beatles – When I’m 64 (1967)

When I’m 64 features an example of pitch manipulation. It’s done by changing the playback speed of the tape the vocal was recorded onto.

The tape is sped up slightly to give a higher pitched and “frail” sound – signifying the 64-year-old man.

Prince often used this technique. You can hear it in songs like Housequake (1987) on the Sign o’ the Times album.

3. Kraftwerk – Autobahn (1974)

The vocal statement as this track kicks in sounds robotic. That is due to the use of a Vocoder machine.

The Vocoder combines the human voice with a synthesiser, creating a strange, futuristic effect.

Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (2001) is another example of this technology.

4. Milli Vanilli – Girl You Know It’s True (1988)

Milli Vanilli is perhaps one of the more controversial examples. That’s because in Girl You know It’s True, the vocals were not performed by the artists themselves. Instead, other anonymous singers were used to lay down the vocals for the albums and the two stars mimed. It caused an uproar when the truth came out.

While not strictly a technique, this is a key pivot point where music is commodified beyond the song into a wider package. The MTV era moved backing track performances to the foreground, as artists – especially pop artists – began to mime to the “perfect” recorded music.

This in turn led to protest performances on shows like the UK’s Top of the Pops, from artists like Oasis who played up to the fact they weren’t singing live.

It also caused embarrassment for singer Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live in 2004 when her lip-synching was revealed as the wrong track played out.

5. Cher – Believe (1998)

Believe was one of the first mainstream examples of using autotune technology as an effect, rather than its intended use of bringing an otherwise out of tune vocal into tune.

The verses and pre-choruses of this track are where this takes place.

This was the catalyst that has led on to autotune being a valid production technique. Its use is exemplified by artists like Charli XCX.

6. Ariana Grande – 7 Rings (2019)

Extreme editing of vocals is achievable in modern music software. We are a long way away from literally taking a razor blade to tape to combine one or two vocal performances, as would have been the norm in the late 50s and 60s.

Nowadays we can edit beyond the individual syllable, and it is common practice to do so, to create the “perfect” performance.

In this example, a stylistic choice has been made to remove the biological necessity of breathing – a technical achievement in vocal layering and processing. There are many other vocal processing effects going on as well, but the minimal breathing is notable.

Grande is also know for using Imogen Heap’s MiMu Gloves to play with her vocals by controlling the sound through hand gestures.

Too much tech?

Artists like Grande use technology creatively. But the use of autotune in particular is becoming standard across recorded, and sometimes even live performance.

It has been argued by artists like Justin Hawkins that many singers sound the way they do precisely because they are not perfect and can’t sing exactly in tune. The character and the nuance of who they are lies in between the tones and microtones.

More sophisticated techniques in production, either live or recorded, will continue to develop, now aided by AI. These developments will challenge ideas of authenticity, creative ethics, artistry and ownership.

But it is my hope that artists and musicians rise to this challenge and discover new creative possibilities, sparking new and unheard sonic textures and musical genres. All the while retaining that most fundamental component of creativity – humanity.

Luke Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Sound Technology, School of Arts, Media and Creative Technologies, University of Salford

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

Sir David Attenborough turns 100 this week.

Very few people have the good fortune to live for a century. Fewer still achieve so much and touch so many lives.

Across his seven decade career with the BBC, Attenborough ushered in the transition from black and white to colour television. He gave the now legendary comedy troupe Monty Python their lucky break, greenlighting their Flying Circus. His keen eye and care for viewers is in part why tennis balls are yellow, not white – they’re much easier to see on screen.

But Attenborough is, of course, most famous for his nature documentaries. For decades, he has fronted the camera to educate, entertain and inspire billions of people about the complexity, wonder and majesty of the natural world, and the many threats it faces. It wasn’t a given – Attenborough was told early in his career his teeth were too big for television!

For ecologists like myself, Attenborough’s work has been a source of deep inspiration. It was instrumental in my decision to pursue a life and a career dedicated to understanding, caring and fighting for the protection of nature. For this gift, I am eternally grateful.

A career driven by curiosity

Attenborough’s connection with nature came early, forged in no small part through an insatiable fascination with fossils – including his childhood joy at discovering an ammonite in the Leicestershire countryside.

He went on to study geology and zoology at Cambridge University, graduating in 1947. He served in the navy and worked in an educational publishing house. Notably, the BBC rejected his first job application as a radio producer in 1950. But he tried again, and joined the BBC as a trainee producer in 1952.

His career in nature documentaries began to bud almost immediately, with his Zoo Quest series beginning in 1954. But it burst into full bloom with the landmark Life on Earth series in 1979, which brought distant locations, extraordinary wildlife and evolution and ecology to TV. It instilled a sense of wonder and awe in audiences, while maintaining and respecting scientific accuracy.

The master storyteller

One reason Attenborough has had such success as a communicator is his understated, calm but authoritative demeanour. When you sit down to watch an Attenborough documentary, you feel in safe hands.

His approach isn’t the norm. In other nature documentaries, wildlife can often seem secondary, as props for the presenter.

In series such as The Living Planet, The Trials of Life, The Blue Planet, The Planet Earth, and scores of others, Attenborough took us across the globe, revealing nature’s beauty, oddities and extraordinary complexity, as well as its macabre and brutal aspects. The habitats home to the world’s species are brought to life in extraordinary detail. We watch with laughter, trepidation, sadness, anger, excitement and awe, ebbing and flowing as nature’s stories unfold.

Who can forget the first time they saw and heard the extraordinary vocal repertoire and mimicry of a lyrebird, or a curious mountain gorilla’s desire to connect with a fellow great ape? The epic battle for survival between a hatchling iguana and hungry hordes of racer snakes? Or the breathtaking explosion of colour and complexity of a coral reef? Each of these was captured by master cinematographers and the story told to us by Attenborough.

Over his long career, Attenborough has become an icon. He was voted the UK’s best TV presenter of all time. But his prodigious output has come at a personal cost too. One of his regrets is how much time he has spent away from his family.

He is also not off limits to criticism. For a long time, Attenborough focused on the glory of nature, largely omitting the damage humans do through overfishing, deforestation, pollution, spreading exotic species, and other threats. He has also shied away from assigning blame to those most responsible for the harms inflicted on nature.

In 2018, he said too much focus on why so much wildlife is threatened was a “turn-off” for some viewers. Ecologists and conservation scientists can sympathise. We know bombarding people with doom and gloom invites apathy and despair, not a desire to act. It’s a hard line to walk between harsh realities and hope.

To his credit, Attenborough has belatedly focused on these issues in recent years. Footage of plastic pollution in Blue Planet II and the ravages of industrial fishing in Ocean have brought a sharp focus on these issues.

In 2020, he released A Life On Our Planet, which he describes as a “witness statement” to the startling losses of biodiversity he has seen over his lifetime. Rather than just spell out the problems, Attenborough laid out how to solve them – and the role we can all play in fixing the two biggest and deeply interwoven problems nature faces: climate change and biodiversity declines and extinctions.

While Attenborough’s earlier work largely avoided these difficult conversations, they succeeded in bringing nature’s wonder to millions of people. This shouldn’t be overlooked. At a time when more and more of us are cut off from nature, Attenborough’s documentaries forged a new connection. For people to care about losing nature, they first have to know and love it.

Conservation relies on stories

Scientific research rarely leads to the behavioural changes we might hope for. Accumulating facts and evidence is vital. But it’s not enough. What humans respond to is stories.

Alongside other globally renowned voices such as the late, great Jane Goodall, Attenborough’s work telling the stories of nature has shaped public opinion. In turn, it has galvanised conservation efforts such as the push to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

As he celebrates his centenary, it’s encouraging to see a new generation and diversity of voices in the media and science communication, advocacy, and scientific community. They speak and share their messages with great clarity, confidence, and passion.

Attenborough is just one person. He can’t replace the vital role of scientists, community leaders, conservationists and policymakers in conserving nature. But no one will ever replace David’s distinctive voice. As he has said:

it seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living

Hear, hear. Happy birthday for May 8th, David Attenborough.

Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

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

Sir David Attenborough has mastered the craft of storytelling. He has undoubtedly inspired generations of people around the globe to love and care for the natural world. And in doing so, he’s become one of the most recognisable – and most trusted – faces on our screens.

Now, he’s celebrating his 100th birthday and a lifetime of wildlife filmmaking. As part of The Conversation UK’s climate storytelling strand, four experts critique how he has influenced everything from conservation and documentary production to the communication of the biggest story of all – climate change.

Scientific insight

Ben Garrod, science broadcaster and Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement at the University of East Anglia, has presented alongside Attenborough in several landmark documentaries. Here he reflects on Attenborough’s passion for furthering our scientific understanding of the natural world.

I once sat on a remote beach with Attenborough, near the very tip of South America. I can still clearly remember the warmth of the rounded, flat stones beneath me. We sat only a metre or so apart. We’d just spent the morning filming the excavation of the largest dinosaur ever discovered.

Over lunch, Attenborough had recalled we were close to a beach he’d filmed at years before, where grey whale mothers drew in close to shore with their calves to rub against the stone in the shallows to exfoliate their skin. As luck would have it, it was the perfect time of year and before long, there we were watching a mother and calf just a few metres offshore.

Facts and figures bubbled out of Attenborough excitedly, not at all like the calm and more measured way we’re all so used to. For those few minutes, he was childlike in his wonder and excitement at the scene in front of us and I marvelled at how he has not only maintained that love for the natural world for so long but how he has always so passionately shared it with the rest of us.

For a century now, Attenborough’s life has been intimately interwoven not only with humanity’s growing scientific understanding of the natural world but also its accelerating loss. Spanning over 70 years, Attenborough has been our most trusted and prolific mediator between scientific knowledge and the public.

His early landmark BBC series Life on Earth: A Natural History (1979) did something few academic texts ever could. It made the complexity of evolutionary biology accessible. Across his work, natural selection, adaptation, ecology and behaviour are not presented as intangible concepts but as organic processes shaping form, function and ultimately survival across the natural world.

In doing so, Attenborough helped normalise evolutionary thinking for hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide, embedding complex scientific principles into popular culture, right in our living rooms.

Central to his work has been a commitment to scientific accuracy. Attenborough’s programmes have been developed in close collaboration with academics and field researchers, ensuring narratives about animal behaviour, ecosystems and biodiversity reflect current evidence.

This relationship between science and storytelling has been crucial because rather than dumbing down complexity, Attenborough’s “everyday” approach demonstrates audiences can engage with content that could all too easily be written off as belonging to more academic and scientifically literate viewers.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

Yet the tone of his work has changed. His early documentaries were characterised by a sense of abundance and discovery. Over time, as scientific evidence for biodiversity loss and climate change mounted, his work shifted accordingly. More recently, his documentaries increasingly shine a light on human impact, habitat destruction and extinction risk. This evolution of change in his own tone mirrors the science itself, highlighting Attenborough’s credibility as a communicator willing to adjust his message as the evidence demands.

Attenborough’s contribution to conservation has not come through activism alone. Research shows that an emotional connection to nature precedes any behavioural change. Attenborough has actively helped build the public conditions necessary for conservation policy and action by fostering wonder, curiosity and empathy for the natural world. His influence can be traced in the generations of scientists, conservationists and educators who cite his programmes as formative experiences.

For many, particularly those without access to wild spaces, Attenborough’s work provides an opportunity and gateway to encounter wild animals and remote ecosystems but also local habitats, helping give us all access to the wonder he perceives in the world around him.

As he turns 100, Attenborough’s legacy is surely inseparable from the global environmental challenges we now face. He has helped society understand not only how life evolved, but, more importantly, why it matters that we protect it now. In an era defined by ecological crisis, his work reminds us that scientific knowledge is most powerful when it connects people to the living world so strongly, it compels us to care enough to protect it, so that we might carry on his legacy and, just like him, act as stewards.

Natural history filmmaking

Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, Professor of Science Communication at the UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies, explains the impact Attenborough has had on natural history television.

In the early 1950s, television was taking off across Britain, but the BBC was still finding its visual voice. Its controller, Cecil McGivern, warned in June 1952 that there was “far too much emphasis…on the spoken word and far too little on the thing seen”. Most early television producers had come from BBC radio and initially made programmes that resembled radio with pictures.

Into this world stepped a young David Attenborough, unencumbered by a career in sound, ready to invent a new language for television and, in the process, reshape natural history filmmaking. At 26, he earned his first natural history credit as producer of The Coelacanth (1953), a 20-minute programme prompted by the capture of a live coelacanth “living fossil” fish off Madagascar.

Eschewing sensationalism, Attenborough tied the story to Darwin’s theory of evolution. This use of wildlife programmes to communicate scientific ideas became his trademark.

The programme blended prerecorded footage with live studio sequences featuring evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, who used the coelacanth to illustrate life’s transition from sea to land.

With the Zoo Quest series (1954), Attenborough began reshaping wildlife television. For these programmes, he travelled to exotic places with staff from the London Zoo to capture animals for the collection. Each episode relied on prerecorded film linked by live studio sequences, allowing tighter narrative control. The hero in the films, shot by Charles Lagus, was Attenborough himself, who back in London also presented the studio sequences. By assuming all the roles of hero, producer, narrator and presenter, Attenborough became the central performer in the story.

From then on, Attenborough’s fluid on-screen performances gained him much acclaim. A very hard worker, he put much effort in producing highly detailed scripts, which left little to chance. Indeed, by the early 1960s, he had all but lost faith in live television, writing to a BBC colleague:

To begin with I got a tremendous kick out of the excitement of putting out programmes live. But it wore off after a bit and really, except for challenging interviews with lots of ‘immediacy’, I’m for film or some other sort of controlled recording process every time. It is so maddening to miss an effect because of some small mechanical hitch, as so often happens live.

Consistently high ratings encouraged others to emulate his method, and live formats became less fashionable. Film-based production also allowed programmes to be stockpiled, repeated and sold, supporting a more sustainable business model.

After Attenborough moved into BBC management in 1965, his goal was to turn natural history television into a science communication genre. He argued that it was “important” to move away from programmes that simply showcased the beauty of nature and instead engage viewers “to examine in a serious and critical way new trends and ideas in zoology”. Returning to hands-on programme-making a decade later, he embedded this vision in his magnum opus, Life on Earth (1979).

In the early 1950s, when Attenborough joined the BBC, natural history television had been mostly conceived of as a specialist genre catering for amateur naturalists to share in the aesthetic and emotional enjoyment of nature. By the 1980s, he had helped transform it into one of the most popular genres of TV programming and a powerful conduit for science communication. This influence continues in his later work, including Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II and Our Planet, which combine cinematic storytelling with urgent environmental themes.

As he celebrates his 100th birthday, Attenborough’s legacy endures, defining natural history television as one of the most powerful forms of science communication and inspiring generations to look at the living world with wonder and understanding.

Communicating research

Saffron O'Neill researches climate communication and public engagement. She explains the ways Attenborough has shaped climate communication techniques across the world.

Attenborough is one of the few voices on climate change that almost everyone is willing to listen to. Over seven decades, his work has transformed how scientific knowledge is communicated, combining advances in broadcasting with powerful storytelling.

Research by Climate Outreach in 2020 found that Attenborough is trusted by people across the political spectrum, from “progressive activists” to “backbone conservatives”. More than 95% of people surveyed recognise him and his programmes reach an exceptionally diverse audience, even in today’s competitive media landscape.

My colleague, PhD researcher Kate Holden, is exploring how young people engage with marine sustainability through online video, from traditional nature documentaries to YouTubers like MrBeast. Attenborough still stands out as an expert young people take seriously.

Part of his appeal lies in his willingness to meet audiences where they are, adapting to changing media habits. He joined Instagram in 2020 (breaking the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to reach one million followers) and has collaborated with Netflix to stream shows.

Attenborough has shown the power of the media to shape how we see the natural world. Although there is little evidence for the appealing notion that watching a documentary like Blue Planet II directly drives behavioural change (such as reducing peoples’ plastic consumption), nature documentaries can certainly drive both public and policy interest via increased media attention.

Engaging the public on climate and nature requires moving beyond a simple notion of “getting the message across” and towards recognising the complexity and power of storytelling. For this, Attenborough’s success is an invaluable model.

His programmes combine top-class storytelling with pioneering technology. The visual appeal of his richly crafted documentaries is matched by compelling stories about little-known species. His work forms a substantial archive of success – many of the most popular TV programmes of all time are his nature documentaries.

In a highly cited paper from 2007, a team led by environmental social scientist Irene Lorenzoni defined engagement with climate change. They claimed that: “It is not enough for people to know about climate change in order to be engaged; they also need to care about it, be motivated and able to take action.”

Early Attenborough programming focused on increasing peoples’ knowledge about the natural world and as part of this, implicitly providing a reason to care about it. Increasingly though, he has moved to a more explicit stance about the climate emergency and our moral and ethical duty to act. An analysis of Attenborough’s use of language carried out in the late 2010s demonstrates this. It shows how he now uses emotional appeals to action. During an appearance on the Outrage + Optimism podcast he said: “we have an obligation on our shoulders and it would be to our deep eternal shame if we fail to acknowledge that.”

When a communicator like activist Greta Thunberg makes an appeal to morality, it can polarise audiences. Attenborough’s broad popularity makes his message reach wider audiences. His trustworthiness, storytelling mastery and innovative use of technology helps explain why he continues to have such a lasting impact on science and environmental communication, seven decades after his first broadcast.

Speaking up about climate change

Chloe Brimicombe, Climate Scientist at the University of Oxford, explores whether Attenborough’s on-screen attention to the climate crisis could have started earlier.

In his early documentaries, Attenborough focused on the wonder of the natural world.

He did go on to warn of the dangers of how humans were damaging the environment, but much of his early messaging reflected the belief that climate change can be linked to overpopulation. This is not demonstrated by the evidence. In fact, the richest in society are the most polluting but the smallest population group.

However, in recent years his beliefs changed with the science and more of his films started to cover climate change directly. For example, Climate Change: The Facts in 2019 and Perfect Planet 2021.

Attenborough’s works are part of the culture of the UK and the world. In my own life Attenborough’s works have always been present. During my undergraduate degree at Aberystwyth University, I was shown Frozen Planet in a lecture about glaciers and ice sheets because my lecturer was featured in the series. That moment stuck with me as I started my career as a climate scientist.

During my PhD in environmental sciences at the University of Reading, my fellow researchers were all big fans of Attenborough and of what could be achieved through the power of documentary film-making. In 2025, I was lucky enough to attend the film premier of Ocean with David Attenborough, something I consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

As well as inspiring audiences with awe and wonder, documentaries can be an important way to communicate what is happening to our changing climate. They reach audiences that might not otherwise engage on the subject. Documentary making has drawn critique for focusing on a producer’s interest instead of capturing the scientific background behind a certain issue.

This has led to schemes such as the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Scheme being setup to help bring scientists and documentary makers together.

In Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet (2020), he talks about the changes he has seen in the natural environment and his concern for the future of the planet. In the film Ocean with David Attenborough, the 2025 premier took place just before the UN’s ocean summit in Nice, France. This helped lead to real policy discussions and changes. That includes supporting the global ocean’s treaty, a landmark international agreement which creates a network of protected ocean sanctuaries.

Attenborough may have been late in communicating specifically on climate change. But, in recent years he has changed to being a strong advocate. Now, it’s time to make sure that message is heard and acted upon so that the world’s wonders remain for many generations to come.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

Chloe Brimicombe, Postdoctoral Researcher, Climate Science, University of Oxford; Ben Garrod, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement, University of East Anglia; Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, Head of Department, Science and Technology Studies, UCL, and Saffron O'Neill, Professor of Geography, University of Exeter

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

Ted Turner, who died on April 6, 2026, was bright, shrewd and, most of all, lucky. The cable TV visionary proved to be in the right place, at the right time, to change television and video news forever.

Most of his big gambles, on things such as the MGM studio and library, which led to the creation of the Turner Classic Movies channel, paid off handsomely.

But Turner will be remembered mostly for the creation and development of the Cable News Network – CNN – which launched in 1980 and made our knowledge of distant events instantaneous and our world more comprehensible. In this sense, Turner’s legacy extends beyond television. He changed our conception not only of journalism but also of our world.

Turner’s obituaries note his record-setting philanthropy, his impressive conservation efforts and his campaign to make the world safer by securing post-Soviet Union era nuclear weaponry. Over the course of his 87 years, Turner proved an outstanding yachtsman, an active and involved sports team owner and a quotable maverick in the business world.

Yet as a scholar of broadcast history – and a former CNN employee – I think Turner’s ultimate legacy is a bit more atmospheric than measurable.

He changed the media ecology in profound and lasting ways. CNN’s arrival disrupted an established media environment, in which broadcast journalism routines and audience viewing habits had become standardized by the ABC, CBS and NBC TV networks.

The ramshackle early CNN, with its farcical “world headquarters” housed in a former Atlanta-area country club, was derided as the “Chicken Noodle Network” by veteran network journalists. But by the mid-1980s it had established profitability, and by 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War, it assumed a singular position in America’s – and the world’s – information environment.

CNN had matured to respectability, and Turner was recognized as a visionary by Time magazine, which named him 1991’s Man of the Year. His idea had blossomed into a new arena for global information sharing, and his cable network fully competed with the established broadcast channels on big stories throughout the 1990s.

Right place, right time, right team

Turner’s cable TV news revolution required significant collaboration. The fulfillment of his vision needed luck, inherited money, innovative new technologies, supportive partners and even federal regulatory intervention.

For example, had Newton Minow’s Federal Communications Commission not pushed Congress to pass the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962, American TV manufacturers would likely never have placed the UHF dial on their sets. That UHF dial made additional local TV competition possible by allowing more stations to broadcast.

In 1970, Turner purchased UHF Channel 17 in Atlanta, which he named WTGC for “Turner Communications Group,” and UHF Channel 36 in Charlotte, North Carolina, which he named WRET for “Robert Edward Turner,” and began building his broadcasting empire.

By the mid-1970s, the cost of satellite distribution to cable system operators had decreased to such an extent that Turner realized – and seized – an opportunity to nationally distribute his local station. He worked with satellite and cable system operators, building early relationships that would prove beneficial to everyone in the cable industry as it developed over the 1980s and ’90s.

In 1979 and 1980, he used these relationships to build the first 24-hour TV network, but it was his internal hires that made the original channel function. To launch CNN, Turner hired veterans of the TV news business, including Robert Wussler, who had previously been president of CBS Sports and the CBS Television Network. And he hired Reese Schonfeld, who had previously founded the Independent Television News Association, a national syndicator of pooled local TV programming.

It was Turner’s vision, investments and established partnerships that made CNN possible. But the creation of the network proved a team effort requiring managerial competence and veteran television production experience.

CNN’s success was never assured. The channel continually lost money in its initial years. But the idea of 24-hour TV news being delivered to paying subscribers, through their cable system operators, proved so valuable that as early as 1981, two CBS executives secretly jetted to Atlanta to meet with Turner and Wussler about purchasing the network.

“I’ll sell you CNN,” he told them. But the deal floundered when the CBS executives would not accept anything less than 51% ownership – and control – of the channel. “You want control? You don’t buy control of Ted Turner’s companies,” he explained. “Forty-nine percent or less.”

Only four years later, Turner would turn the tables and attempt to take over CBS.

Turner came very close to living long enough to see CBS and CNN under a single ownership. CBS’ parent company, Paramount Skydance, is closing in on the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, the corporation that owns CNN.

Yet today, these two once hugely profitable news operations have been subsumed within massive multinational corporations, with their legacy brand equity providing as much value to their ownership as their journalism. Turner had long bemoaned the managerial fate of his cable news channel, which he sold to Warner Bros. in 1996.

Success invites criticism, establishes a legacy

Turner is one of the few figures in American media history who left a clearly identifiable legacy. There was a media world that existed before CNN and the one that came after. CNN’s success gave rise to competitors such as MSNBC, Fox News and others.

These channels simultaneously differentiated themselves from CNN while constantly measuring themselves against their older rival. But Turner’s original vision was distinct from the panel programs and punditry that’s now replaced original reporting from around the world.

Turner wanted to own and operate a global news organization where the news would always be the star, and where, like the classic wire services, professional reporting would be instant and accurate. And he wanted to make a fortune while doing it.

When he finally succeeded, critics began to complain about what journalist and academic Tom Rosenstiel called “The Myth of CNN” in a cover story in The New Republic in 1994. Scholars bemoaned CNN for its privileging good visuals over context and depth. They argued that its foreign coverage failed to maintain sufficient independence from the U.S. government.

Dictators and terrorists around the world learned to exploit CNN to get their messages across to the American public. In this sense, CNN’s neutrality, once a source of respect and credibility, could also undermine it by making the channel easily exploitable.

Billions of people around the world now take for granted the profusion of news access to anywhere on earth, at any time of day or night. That world was unimaginable before Turner’s work to make CNN conceivable and then real.

His legacy is not simply a series of cable channels but an entirely new way of thinking about information retrieval and access. Think about that the next time you scroll past video clips from London, Tokyo, Beirut or Mexico City, or check out breaking news videos from Ukraine or Tehran. And thank Ted for making such a world possible.

Michael J. Socolow, Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine

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

Peas aren’t often seen as a particularly exciting vegetable. They tend to be treated as a basic side dish or something people eat out of habit, rather than choice. But they’re also cheap, widely available and contain a combination of nutrients that can have a positive impact on our health.

While peas will not transform health on their own, when eaten regularly they can provide a useful contribution to daily protein, fibre and micronutrients intake.

Here are a few reasons why peas are worth including in your diet more often.

1. They’re a source of plant protein

Protein is essential for maintaining muscle, immune function and helping us feel full after meals. While not the highest protein food out there, they contain more protein than most vegetables.

Cooked green peas provide around 5g of protein per 100g, while dried peas contain closer to 8g per 100g. That is less than lentils (around 6g per 100g) or chickpeas (over 7g per 100g), but more than vegetables such as carrots (less than 0.5g of protein per 100g) or sweetcorn (less than 3g per 100g).

Pea protein has a well-balanced amino acid profile, containing all nine essential amino acids. These are the building blocks for protein, which the body uses for growth and repair, as well as to make enzymes, hormones and immune molecules.

However, like other grain legumes, peas are relatively low in sulfur‑containing amino acids – particularly methionine, which plays a key role in protein synthesis and growth.

This means that peas would not be ideal as your sole protein source. But since most people eat peas alongside other plant and animal proteins, this isn’t usually a problem – and peas can be a useful way to increase your protein intake.

Pea protein is also relatively easy to digest and absorb. Research suggests it has good bioavailability compared with many other plant protein sources, meaning the body can make good use of it.

2. Their fibre supports gut and metabolic health

Many people do not eat enough dietary fibre. Peas can help contribute to you achieving the recommended 30g of fibre per day. A 100g portion of cooked peas provides more than 6g of fibre, with dried peas providing even more (around 8g of fibre per 100g). Fibre plays an important role in digestive health, but its effects extend beyond the gut.

Peas contain both insoluble and soluble fibre. Insoluble fibre helps move food through the digestive system, reducing constipation. Soluble fibre dissolves in water to form a gel‑like substance, which slows digestion and helps regulate blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

Peas also contain prebiotic fibres, including galactooligosaccharides. These fibres feed beneficial bacteria in the gut, rather than being digested by the body. Supporting these bacteria helps achieve a more diverse gut microbiome, which has been linked to better metabolic health.

3. Peas contain iron and other beneficial plant compounds

Iron is essential for producing the blood protein haemoglobin, which carries oxygen around the body. But iron deficiency remains common worldwide, particularly among people who menstruate.

While vegetables are not usually major sources of iron, peas contain more iron than many commonly eaten vegetables such as carrots and peppers. However, it’s important to make sure you’re eating the right type of peas if you’re looking to get more iron in your diet.

For instance, mature peas tend to contain higher levels of phytic acid, a compound that can limit iron absorption in the gut. Green peas, which are harvested earlier, contain iron while having much lower levels of phytic acid. This gives garden peas and petit pois a more favourable iron‑to‑phytate ratio, which is associated with better iron bioavailability.

Peas also contain polyphenols, including flavonoids. These are plant compounds that have antioxidant and anti‑inflammatory effects, helping protect cells from damage and supporting overall health.

Regularly consuming flavonoids has been associated with improved cardiovascular health, better blood sugar regulation, and a lower risk of several chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer.

4. They’re one of the most affordable healthy foods

Cost plays a major role in influencing what people eat. Peas remain one of the cheapest ways to add some extra protein and fibre to meals.

Frozen peas can be bought for around £1 to £1.50 per kilogram at most major supermarkets. They’re frequently cheaper than other frozen vegetables, and much cheaper than many fresh vegetables.

Frozen peas also generate very little waste. You can cook the amount you need, which makes them good value for households trying to eat well on a limited budget.

5. Peas are easy to store, cook and eat regularly

Convenience also has a strong influence on food choices. Peas are easy to keep and use in different ways. Fresh, frozen, tinned and dried peas all have a place, but frozen peas are particularly practical.

Frozen vegetables are usually harvested at peak ripeness and frozen quickly. This helps preserve nutrients and reduces spoilage. Studies show that frozen and canned vegetables are nutritionally comparable to fresh varieties, and sometimes even retain nutrients better during storage.

Because peas require little preparation, they’re easy to add to meals that families already eat. They may even be more of a hit with children. Research suggests that many children are more accepting of vegetables that are soft and slightly sweet rather than bitter or tough, which may explain why peas are often better received than other vegetables.

Keeping peas on hand also makes it easy to add to your and your child’s platess regularly. Research shows that the more children are given a certain type of food, the more likely they are to eat them.

Simple ways to eat more peas

Including peas does not require major changes to eating habits. Keeping a bag of peas in the freezer makes it easy to add them to pasta, rice, risottos or curries, or to serve them as a quick side.

Peas can also be blended into soups, stirred into sauces, or added into pesto. Dried, frozen or tinned peas work well in soups and stews.

Peas may not seem exciting. But as part of a varied diet, they’re a reliable way to add protein, fibre and nutrients without adding too much cost or complexity.

Rachel Woods, Associate Professor, University of Nottingham; University of Lincoln

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

A recent trip to Haworth, in West Yorkshire, got me thinking about Anne Brontë, who died 177 years ago this month. Stepping into St Michael and All Angels’ Church, a carved stone pillar prominently declares the location of the Brontë family vault. All members of the Brontë family – parents Patrick and Maria, sisters Elizabeth and Maria who died young, the rebellious brother Branwell, and Emily and Charlotte – are all listed. Yet, not mentioned is Anne Brontë, who is buried in Scarborough, almost 100 miles away.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights are repeatedly included on lists of Britain’s favourite novels and are firmly ensconced in the popular literary canon.

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey occasionally receive an honourable mention, but are often nowhere in sight. Like their author, they have been too frequently overlooked. Googling for articles on Anne Brontë brings up very few hits. I began to wonder: why is that?

Finding Anne

Agnes Grey, A Novel was the name of Anne’s first book, published in December 1847. She had been working on the text for many months before sending it off to the publisher Thomas Cautley Newby in July of that year. Emily’s Wuthering Heights was also accepted by Newby at the same time. It was a painful two months later that Charlotte finally found a publisher for her book, Jane Eyre.

Unluckily for her sisters, Charlotte’s publisher was more proactive than their own, and Jane Eyre became a sensation. Newby then decided to print Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights, riding on the coattails of Charlotte’s success. More naturalistic than Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, but similarly focused on the life of a poor governess, Anne’s novel had been upstaged and was received, as the author Samantha Ellis notes, as a “pale imitation of Jane Eyre”.

Even worse, the gender-neutral pseudonyms the sisters had chosen to hide their identities (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell), had ensured that the three books were thought to have been by only one author. Anne was not disheartened by Charlotte’s success or these authorship disputes however, and soon embarked on her second literary project.

Appallingly, many editions of Anne second and most famous work, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, have been abridged. In 1854, overzealous publisher Thomas Hodgson slashed huge chunks of text which featured controversial subject matter detailing the protagonist’s concerns about her husband’s depraved behaviour, so that the novel would fit neatly into a single volume.

Brontë scholars declare this to be a “corrupt text”, which cuts four pages of the novel’s opening, all expletives (filler words), 25 additional paragraphs and most of chapter 28. While more recent editions of the novel have reprinted the original 1848 text, many of us, without knowing, have read the potted version.

This censorship of Anne’s text is frankly unacceptable, as poor editing aside, much contextual information which she included for a reason has been removed. Charlotte’s opinion of her sister’s book, writing in a letter in 1850 that it “hardly appears desirable to preserve”, also damaged Anne Brontë’s reputation further.

Far from Haworth

Another factor in her neglect is that Anne’s grave is miles away from the rest of her family’s. She travelled to Scarborough in 1849 in an attempt to ease the symptoms of the tuberculosis that killed her only three days after her arrival.

Only a very dedicated Brontë fan would follow in her footsteps and make the pilgrimage to Scarborough in addition to Haworth. This Yorkshire town will always be the main site of the Brontë sisters fandom as long as their home, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, remains. Anne Brontë does not have a formal memorial in Haworth, while the rest of her family is buried there. This sets her apart even more.

Perhaps it is simply that Anne was the youngest in a remarkable family, and so in death is overlooked as she may have been in life. Or her stories are not the gothic fantasies featuring troubled and problematic literary heroes like Rochester and Heathcliff we immediately associate with the Brontë name.

Instead, Anne Brontë’s works are visceral and real, commenting unflinchingly on the dark sides of human nature: cruelty and violence to children and women, adultery, alcoholism, and coercive control being just some of the topics she covers. Contemporary reviewers called the novel “brutal” and “coarse”.

Utterly shocking at the time, with its descriptions of alcohol abuse and a female protagonist leaving her unhappy marriage, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is often hailed as a feminist masterpiece. Yet, this does not tie into the romantic ideal readers expect. Wuthering Heights grapples with many of the same themes, but while that novel is viewed as a gothic romance, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered by many as a social-realist text.

This enduring oversight could be for all of these reasons or a combination of some. Still, I resent the descriptions of Anne by journalists such as Charlotte Cory as the “runt of the literary litter”, and urge readers and Brontë fans to give her work a chance in its own right.

The 1996 mini-series of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is available to watch online. To me it is a travesty that it is 30 years since there was an adaptation of this novel. And there has never been a big-screen treatment of Agnes Grey, while Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have seen myriad film versions. A fine writer and one who is equal to her sisters, Anne Brontë deserves better.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org; if you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Amy Wilcockson, Research Fellow, English Literature, Queen Mary University of London

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

Music superstar Taylor Swift has applied to trademark her voice and image to head off the threat of AI-generated impersonations. But the problem extends much further than pop royalty.

Anyone can be manipulated by the powerful technology: AI-created videos of you endorsing a politician you despise, images on social media of you in a skin-tight Spiderwoman outfit you never wore, a simulation of your voice allowing users to indulge their sexual fantasies … all possible.

The rapid development of deepfakes is amplifying calls for better legal protections for individuals’ images and likenesses. The notorious rollout of new picture-editing capabilities by X’s Grok chatbot in late 2025 only added to their urgency.

And the law has begun to respond. Australia now criminalises creating and sharing sexually explicit material online, including digitally created material.

In the US, the 2025 Take it Down Act prohibits non-consensual publication of intimate depictions of individuals, including “digital forgeries”.

In New Zealand, proposed amendments to the Crimes Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act will improve criminal law responses to sexual deepfakes.

But another legal front is opening up, too: victims are turning to tort law. Part of the civil (rather than criminal) law, tort claims do not require the state to act. People can seek damages and injunctions to shut down or block access to the harmful and humiliating material.

Misappropriation of personality

Some countries, including Canada, South Africa and India, recognise a common law tort of misappropriation of personality.

This targets unauthorised use of a person’s name, likeness and voice, usually for commercial purposes. About half of the states in the US recognise some version of this tort.

Now, the Indian courts are taking the lead in extending the tort to include deepfakes.

Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Anil Kapoor have used tort law to shut down websites and other online platforms where deepfakes have been posted – including fake pornographic videos and chatbots.

Elsewhere, including in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia, the law is much more piecemeal because the common law does not recognise a specific tort of misappropriation of personality.

This means protections need to be cobbled together from more established legal claims, including defamation, breach of confidence and and “passing off”.

A court battle is currently raging in the UK over whether a digitally-assisted resurrection of Peter Cushing in the 2016 Star Wars movie Rogue One is a form of “unjust enrichment”. (Cushing starred in a previous Star Wars episode but died in 1994.)

The right to live with dignity

In the Bollywood cases, the courts explained that deepfakes affect victims’ “right to live with dignity”. The judges linked these tort principles to constitutional protections for “life and liberty”.

Canadian judges have said similar things, linking protections for individuals’ personality to rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights.

Human dignity – essentially the right not to be a means to others’ ends – is at the core of these protections and it recognises the inherent worth of all people. Deepfakes cut right across these fundamental legal commitments.

In the case of Anil Kapoor, the court acknowledged additional harms beyond those he suffered. The legal protections were also for “the sake of his family and friends who would not like to see his image, name and other elements being misused, especially for such tarnishing and negative use”.

This recognises an emerging legal concern with connections between people, not only with the rights of individuals. It also aligns with the increasing role of Māori tikanga (law and custom) in New Zealand’s common law.

Another welcome development in the United States is proposed legislation that would enable non-celebrities, not just the rich and famous, to bring damages claims and seek injunctions against deepfakes.

A bill introduced to Congress in April would extend protections to US citizens’ “DNA sequences or traits” that could be used to replicate or misuse identity in commercial applications.

Protecting victims of deepfakes will require an array of legal responses: criminal, civil, technological and regulatory – including trademark law, as Taylor Swift is using.

Unfortunately, few of us have the financial means to bring a torts claim. Even so, the emphasis on human dignity in the Bollywood cases reminds us of what’s at stake: the inherent worth of all people – celebrities and non-celebrities alike.

Graeme Austin, Professor of Law, University of Melbourne; Chair of Private Law, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

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

Displays of artworks from the permanent collections of state and national galleries are often overlooked. Critics tend to flock to a crowded calendar of blockbusters and temporary shows. These may offer greater novelty and relevance for current events. But this isn’t always true.

New Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia is a case in point. Tucked away on the second floor, it would be easy to miss this showcase for new acquisitions and collection highlights.

But the culturally, stylistically and materially diverse display is a welcome treat for those who take the time to wander this far into the building.

The weight of moving images

Two groups of related works bracket the space, distinct in aesthetic but mirrored in concept.

A suite of new acquisitions created between 2012 and 2016 by Thai-born contemporary artist Korakrit Arunanondchai takes up one end of the gallery.

Visitors are invited to lay back on denim cushions to watch his 25-minute video. Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2014-15) is a multilingual reflection on globalisation, myth and identity.

Arunanondchai uses sculptural elements to lend weight to moving images. I found similarities with fellow Bangkok-based film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose meditative video installation A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage) featured earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Arunanondchai’s mannequins in painted denim embody themes of self-creation and costumed performance. They are avatars for a global culture that transforms all it touches – at least at face value.

The mirrored acrylic surfaces of Untitled (2557–2558) (Mirror 3) (2012) and Untitled (Ground) (2016) invite viewers to consider their own place in this cultural tide. Reflected faces are adorned with cast-off tech, scraps of denim and scattered twigs and soil. It is a bowerbird-like collage of trophies and scraps.

Weerasethakul transformed the algorithmic flow of a social media feed into a dream-like stream of half-seen images. Arunanondchai mimics the aerial viewpoint and slick editing of tourism promos and music videos. His work is just as captivating, but much more maximalist in tone.

Exploring cultural exports

At the opposite end of the gallery, a second group of mannequins showcase Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please Guest Artist Series (1996–98).

Designed in collaboration with contemporary artists Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo Qiang, these also exemplify the global flow of cultural forms.

Here, the Americanisation implied by acid-wash denim comes into contact with Japanese “soft power” narratives of design innovation and technological ingenuity.

Similar narratives can be read into Tokyo-based artist collective teamLab’s four-channel video Black waves (2016) and Yoshitomo Nara’s painting No War (2019).

Nara’s large-headed girl in acrylics on wood combines the child-like “cuteness” of kawaii culture with the graphic appeal of Takashi Murakami’s “superflat” aesthetic. Both are lucrative cultural exports.

TeamLab have found global fame as “ultra-technologists”. They are committed to a digital metamorphosis of Japanese artistic traditions. Black waves transforms the linear style of ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world”, into an ocean of living pixels.

Samples of these traditions appear throughout the space. Miyake, Nara and teamLab are tied to a longer lineage of cultural exchange.

A selection of nihonga, “Japanese-style paintings”, of Mt Fuji document an earlier era of soft power. They were presented to Australia by the International Cultural Appreciation Society of Japan in 1977.

Kato Shinmei’s Maiko, apprentice geisha (1976) is another nihonga work. It implies a connection between the Yoshiwara pleasure district at the centre of ukiyo-e and the contemporary “floating worlds” of global fashion and politics.

Kabuki actor portraits dating to the 1920s and 1930s exemplify the renewal of ukiyo-e as part of the shin-hanga or “new prints” movement.

This reinforces the exhibition’s overarching themes of performance, impersonation and surface appeal masking hidden realities.

Much more than a highlight reel

These themes are evident, too, in a stellar display of mostly Chinese photographic works lining the gallery walls.

Featuring iconic images by Hong Hao, Song Dong, Wang Qingsong and Yang Fudong newly acquired for the collection, this is a real stand-out.

Their conceptually complex, technically daring and aesthetically polished visions of consumerist excess, urban squalor and the fragile boundaries of self-identity illustrate the burst of Chinese photographic artistry during the 1990s and 2000s.

Contemporary art photography is one of several core collection strengths of the gallery celebrated in New Asian Art. They sit alongside contemporary Southeast Asian art, Japanese prints and Indonesian textiles (in a stunning display of contemporary batik shoulder slings and skirts).

The exhibition offers much more than a highlight reel. Curators Carol Cains and Shaune Lakin have carefully selected both new and more familiar works to draw out the fluidity of contemporary Asian identities, fusing past and present, myth and technology and local and global cultural currents.

New Asian Art is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until April 18 2027.

Alex Burchmore, Senior Lecturer, Art History and Curatorial Studies, Australian National University

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

Over the past 15 years, I have witnessed university students’ shrinking patience for reading – especially for reading “long” books. Increasingly, students also opt for audiobooks. While speeding up the reading experience, these fundamentally change what is noticed.

The neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf suggests many students no longer have the “cognitive patience” to read long books due to the complexities of thought and sustained attention required.

One explanation for this shift is the dominance of digital technology in our daily lives, which has rewired our brains for surface-level scanning and multitasking, weakening our capability for prolonged attention. Another is our culture of instant gratification.

Some studies into the “screen inferiority effect” suggest when we read on paper (rather than on screens such as smartphones) the brain often processes more deeply and comprehension is better. Memory and information recall are also stronger.

So where does this leave the classics?

Millions of Australians, both children and adults, struggle with literacy.

In this series, we explore the challenges of reading in an age of smartphones and social media – and ask experts how we can become better readers.

Many books considered “classics” are long. Masterpieces such as Middlemarch or Les Misérables might seem intimidating because in physical form they resemble door stops and they often have complex, demanding language and long, convoluted sentences.

But reading the classics can deliver cognitive, social, emotional and even ethical benefits, helping us strengthen habits of thoughtful attention and develop the skills to communicate with clarity and empathy.

Extending our attention spans increases our ability to connect thoughts and ideas, challenges memory and recall and perhaps helps us attend more patiently to our own lives and the lives of others. In reading Robinson Crusoe, for instance, we share in the patience of the title character, stranded on a desert island. We, too, pay careful heed to details and signs in the world around him.

The complex language of classics can help us discern meaning amid a multitude of voices. When working through multiple sentence clauses and the layered sentences of a meaningful paragraph we need to suspend judgement until we have the fuller picture. Following complex and interwoven narratives also helps us to understand human complexity in real life.

Here are some tips for reading the classics – and some shorter ones to start with.

1. Follow your instincts

Find out which classic novels influenced the development of your favourite genre and you might find a natural fit. My brilliant English teacher at school, Mr Taylor, knew I loved detective fiction, so he kept recommending Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone as an early example of crime mystery. Eventually taking his advice, I loved it and followed it with Collins’s other classic, The Woman in White.

2. Remove distractions

It can help to set aside dedicated reading time, such as 20–30 minutes a day in which phones, smartwatches and other devices are out of the way. There is an added benefit: research by Mindlab International has shown reading for only six minutes reduces stress levels by 68%.

3. Make a note of memorable sentences

You don’t need a teacher to notice powerful moments or startling language. For example, Charles Dickens’s opening to A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”) famously captures the coexistence of extremes in the world – of hope and despair, of wisdom and foolishness. Dickens has crafted an enduring truth of human experience.

4. Ask yourself questions

Why is this considered a classic? Why do I dislike this particular character? Why does this scene make me feel uncomfortable? Usually, the author wants you to consider why things were written the way they were (rather than, for example, with a different vocabulary or narrative voice). Asking questions deepens comprehension.

5. Embrace the unknown

If longer sentences or old-fashioned language trip you up, go over them again and then keep going. Kindles offer instant definitions at the touch of the screen but sometimes looking up every word in the dictionary can interfere with the opportunity to deduce meaning from context.

6. Be ready to laugh

Some classic novels are downright funny. I am currently reading Anthony Trollope’s The Warden. The sentences may be long, but they are almost always punctuated with hilarious insights into the hypocrisies of human beings and the naming rights the author deploys are childishly funny.

7. Read aloud

Classic novels were often serialised and read aloud in instalments in families or community groups. As a teenager, some of my most memorable early forays into the classics were shared with a dear cousin while staying with our grandparents in the Blue Mountains, when we would read aloud to each other on wintry, windy nights by the fireplace. Here, I first encountered Daphne Du Maurier’s evocative West Country mystery Rebecca and Dodie Smith’s eccentric and funny I Capture the Castle. Begin your adventure into the classics by reading aloud with a friend or in a book club.

8. Don’t feel too daunted

Remember that getting started with the story, getting to know the writer’s style, gradually piecing together the world of the novel can be the hardest stage. Take your time, be patient and persist. The further you get into a novel like War and Peace, the easier it is to continue because you simply want to know what happens.

Here are three short classics worth the journey.

George Eliot’s Silas Marner

A heartwarming study of the “inward life” of Silas, the weaver, exiled from his fellowship of narrow religious sectarians. He finds purpose in life, first in money and then in the fatherly love he develops for Eppie, the child who wanders into his home. Silas Marner is an accessible taster of Eliot’s longer experiments exploring emotion and “fellow feeling”.

James Joyce’s Dubliners

This book is, strictly speaking, a collection of 12 short stories. Together they form a masterpiece of brutal Anglo-Irish realism interrupted by moments of epiphany. The book contends with questions of action and inaction, betrayal, political idealism and pragmatism. The story of Eveline, who is on the cusp of eloping with the “very kind, manly, and open-hearted” Frank on a night-boat to Buenos Aires to escape the ill-treatment of her ageing, abusive father, leaves the reader astonished by the sudden departure in the final lines from her earlier rational self-analysis.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

An experimental novel set on one summer’s day in London, 1923. The socialite Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party but the absence of any chapter breaks in the book creates for the reader a sense of the stifling impact of war that still lingers over British family, social and political life. In the trauma of returned soldier Septimus Smith we read an early fictional exploration of shell shock.

Johanna Harris, Associate Professor, Literature, Western Civilisation Program, Australian Catholic University

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

On Mother’s Day, Americans go all out with gift-buying and dining out to honor the women in their lives. In fact, according to some estimates, consumer spending in the United States on this day is around US$34 billion.

This consumerist emphasis has long been criticized – including by the holiday’s founder, Anna Jarvis. She started the celebration in 1908 to honor her own mother, Civil War-era activist Ann Jarvis, who founded Mothers’ Day Work Clubs in her native West Virginia.

These clubs were associations of local mothers who came together for collective workdays during which they provided education and assistance to families. When the Civil War broke out, the clubs pivoted to promoting peace and reconciliation and offered food and medical assistance to both Union and Confederate soldiers. These mothers viewed peace as the only way to preserve their communities and to ensure the health and well-being of all.

As a scholar of Greek and Roman antiquity, I’m aware that honoring motherhood goes far beyond women’s work in the domestic sphere. In fact, for millennia the role of mothers has included not only childbearing and education but also protection over the community as a whole, especially through advocacy for peace.

Texts dating as far back as the fifth century B.C.E. show mothers promoting peace. In Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” the women of Athens unite to end the Peloponnesian War. The leader of the peace movement argues that women suffer twice as much as men in war – bearing children only to send them off to die as soldiers.

Mothers and ancient goddesses

In the ancient world, motherhood itself guaranteed a woman’s power within her family and community, especially if the baby was male. The birth provided an heir for the family and ensured that the woman was not going to be rejected by her husband for childlessness.

In fact, as classical scholar Florencia Foxley explains, motherhood elevated a woman to the rank of protectress and sustainer of the city because she provided a new generation of citizens and soldiers for the community.

The birth of children also gave the woman unofficial power and influence over the political decisions made by her husband and sons, as dramatized in the play “Lysistrata.”

The cult of the Greek goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus and queen of the gods, reflects this dual function of mothers as protectors of children and of communities in the ancient world.

Hera was worshipped in wedding rituals, and she presided over childbirth in the figure of her daughter Eileithyia, the midwife goddess. Beyond the domestic sphere, Hera was also the divine protectress of the ancient city of Argos.

In Rome, under her Latin name Juno, she was worshipped with the epithets of Pronuba as the goddess of marriage, and Lucina as the goddess of childbirth. Nonetheless, Juno was also an integral part of the Capitoline Triad with Jupiter and Minerva, the trio of deities that protected the city. In fact, Juno was credited with saving Rome from an attack by the Gauls in 390 B.C.E. when her sacred geese warned the Romans of the approaching enemy army.

Contemporary practices

The tremendous power of women as peace advocates and protectors of communities continues today.

As journalist Margot Adler has shown, some neo-pagans believe that ancient societies that worshipped mother deities were more peaceful than cultures with patriarchal religious traditions. Today, these worshippers seek to revive the cults of mother deities in order to return to this harmonious way of life. They invoke mother goddesses to promote the political power of women, demilitarization and harmony with the natural world, as well as world peace.

Similarly, “Lysistrata” continues to inspire women’s advocacy for peace worldwide. In 2003, for instance, peace activists Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower advocated against the Iraq War by coordinating over 1,000 readings of “Lysistrata” worldwide in a single day.

Admittedly, the play presents female characters in ridiculous ways and, as classical scholar Mary Beard has pointed out, the ending of the play makes it clear that women’s political power is only a fantasy. Yet the play acknowledges that women suffered disproportionately from the consequences of war in ancient times, just as they do today.

The play also acknowledges, albeit in a humorous way, that women wield tremendous power for peace, which is borne out today as well. In fact, according to a study by King’s College London, “states where women hold more political power are less likely to go to war and less likely to commit human rights abuses.”

In a different context, Catholics around the world honor Mary as a mother figure associated with peace and justice. One of her manifestations, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is a popular figure of veneration in Mexico and Latin America, particularly among people of Indigenous descent.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is represented pregnant and venerated by devotees seeking protection and peace. Pope John Paul II, in a public prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1979, asked her to “grant peace, justice and prosperity to our peoples.”

The way Mother’s Day is celebrated in the U.S. today conspicuously omits the tremendous power that women wield beyond the domestic sphere. While women’s work raising children and supporting their families is important and should always be honored, Anna Jarvis envisioned this day as more expansive – a day that honors women as political and moral actors, especially as agents of peace globally.

Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Tufts University

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

The run-up to a budget always sees a degree of chaos. But this year it has looked like one of those willy willies that blow up in outback Australia when the wind stirs a storm of dust.

A Middle East war, a fuel crisis, another interest rate rise, calls for extra cost-of-living help amid warnings against high government spending, accusations of prime ministerial lying – they are collectively testing the government’s ability to control how it wants to frame its fifth budget.

But the immediate “narrative” it puts on the budget is one thing – more significant in the longer term is getting its settings right in these extraordinarily volatile times, something we’ll only be able to judge in retrospect.

As is the modern way, some major items have been announced well before Tuesday’s main event, including reform of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and a fuel security plan.

The NDIS overhaul is the big money saver in the budget, a whopping $22 billion. But that is based on heroic, and surely questionable, assumptions, most notably that the scheme’s annual spending growth, now 10%, can be slashed to an average annual 2% in each of the coming four years.

Unless the figures are to be manipulated, this surely defies all previous experience with this scheme. Applying the brakes that sharply looks impossible, especially as some of the details are still to be worked out, and consultations (which often bring concessions) are yet to be held.

If the NDIS’s early cuts can’t be achieved, the government has a hole in its savings package.

It would be interesting to know whether Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock is sceptical about the NDIS savings assumption. Bullock, who has previously been wary of appearing to call out excessive government spending, was explicit this week, telling her post interest rate rise news conference, “when governments are spending a lot of money and we’re running up against capacity constraints, then they do need to think about whether or not there’s ways they can help the inflation problem by looking for ways to constrain demand”.

Questioned about this statement, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who insists he will save more than he spends in the budget, played down her words, saying she was answering a “hypothetical” question. (She had been asked whether too much reliance was placed on central banks rather than governments to keep inflation under control.) Bullock did give a nod to Chalmers’ efforts to constrain demand, but she must have been aware of how her words would be heard, given the controversy around anything she says on spending.

The government went to the 2025 election promising income tax cuts, and some changes to the tax treatment of superannuation, but not much else on the tax front. But after the post-election economic roundtable it became clear Chalmers was going to pitch to include significant tax changes in this budget. The question was: would Anthony Albanese let him do so?

From what we know so far, the answer seems to be “yes”, with anticipated reworkings of the capital gains tax (CGT) and negative gearing (and possibly tougher tax treatment of trusts).

A political cost is already being paid – by Albanese, who before the election promised (at times belligerently) not to tinker with negative gearing or CGT. Questioned this week about potentially breaking his word, the prime minister’s tone was narky.

Leaving aside the basic issue of integrity, in political terms does breaking these promises matter?

With Labor having a massive majority and the opposition shambolic, the government will reckon it can get away with it, so long as it can present a budget with more “winners” than losers and it can carry the (not uncontested) argument that it is promoting intergenerational equity. To help with this, the budget will promise a modest one-off handout for taxpayers in work.

But the deceit further undermines the trust people have in the political system and its politicians.

Saturday’s byelection in former opposition leader Sussan Ley’s seat of Farrer will be a case study in how trust has leached away from the so-called “parties of government”.

For three quarters of a century the southern New South Wales seat – centred on Albury while extending to the South Australian border – has been safely in Coalition hands. It was once held by the Nationals’ deputy prime minister Tim Fischer. But this weekend the contest is set to be between One Nation’s David Farley and high-profile community independent Michelle Milthorpe, accused by her opponents of being a “teal” (because she has received Climate 200 money), a label she disowns.

Different as they appear at first glance, the community independents (including the teals) and One Nation represent two versions of today’s “grievance” politics. It’s ironic, but symbolic, that in Farrer they are both decked out in orange.

The regional strand of the “community candidate” movement can be traced to Cathy McGowan, who wrested Indi (across the Murray River from Farrer) from the Liberals in 2013, and was succeeded in the seat by another independent, Helen Haines (who has campaigned for Milthorpe). McGowan and her followers wanted to make Indi more politically salient, rather than being regarded as a safe seat governments and oppositions could effectively ignore when it came to needs and services.

Community candidates exploit the grievance constituents have that their electorate is not being heard. Milthorpe captured their essence when she told the Guardian, “I’m here because I was feeling dissatisfied with the major parties. They don’t understand our regional context. My job is to take the voices of Farrer to parliament and make sure that people understand what we need out here.”

One Nation has a much wider view of many voters’ sense of “grievance” – reflecting and amplifying, for example, discontent over the size and composition of immigration.

Community candidates want a place at the political table for their electorates: One Nation wants to overturn the table.

In Farrer, the idiosyncratic Farley doesn’t quite fit the One Nation policy mould, but the voters are reacting to a vibe, and to Pauline Hanson, rather than worrying about the fine print.

Saturday’s result will frame, for the worse, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s budget week. The expected Liberal loss will be a setback for him, whoever wins. If the victor is One Nation (which is getting Liberal preferences) it will be more serious because that will pump up the already highly inflated tyres of a party that could do serious damage to the Liberals’ prospects in the coming Victorian election.

To come back to where we started, whether it’s Farley or Milthorpe, the result in Farrer seems certain to set off a willy willy.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

The Swedish government recently announced it was moving from the classroom use of digital devices back to physical books. It cited concerns over declining test scores and increasing screen time.

Are these concerns well founded? And what does the science of reading say about the possible consequences of reading on digital devices versus books?

To address these questions, it’s worth remembering that, although reading might appear to be an easy task, this impression is false. Reading is arguably the most difficult task one must learn – one that requires years of formal education and practice to master. In contrast to spoken language, it is a skill we are not biologically predisposed to learn.

Millions of Australians, both children and adults, struggle with literacy.

In this series, we explore the challenges of reading in an age of smartphones and social media – and ask experts how we can become better readers.

Why is reading so difficult?

To understand why reading is difficult, one must first understand the physiology of reading.

As you are reading this sentence, your eyes are making a series of rapid movements, called saccades, from one word to the next. During these saccades, the processing of visual information is suppressed and is only available during brief intervals, called fixations, when the eyes are stationary.

Experiments that measure readers’ eye movements have shown we fixate most words because our capacity to extract visual information during each fixation is extremely limited.

In languages like English that are read from left to right, our capacity to perceive the features that distinguish letters is limited to a small region of the visual field called the perceptual span. This span extends from 2-3 letter spaces to the left of fixation to 8-12 letter spaces to the right of fixation.

The span’s asymmetry reflects the movement of attention through the text. It extends to the left in languages like Arabic, which are read from right to left. The size of the span is smaller for dense writing systems, such as Chinese.

We also know from eye-tracking and brain-imaging experiments that words require time to identify. Our best estimates suggest visual information requires 60 milliseconds to propagate from the eyes to the brain and words then require an additional 100-300 milliseconds to identify. (A millsecond is one-thousandth of a second).

These constraints limit the maximum rate of reading to 300-400 words per minute, depending on the difficulty of the text and one’s level of comprehension.

Speed-reading advocates, who falsely promise faster reading speeds, teach you how to skim a text. Comprehension declines at a rate inversely proportional to the gain in speed.

Importantly, the upper limit for reading speed requires years of practice to attain, because it requires the brain systems that support vision, attention, word identification, language processing and eye movements to operate in a highly coordinated manner. Anything that prevents this coordination will therefore reduce comprehension.

Consequences of digital reading

So what are the likely consequences of digital reading?

With some devices, such as e-readers, there is little reason to suspect digital reading differs from the reading of books, because both formats support the mental processes required for skilled reading.

The more questionable devices are those introducing distractions (such as news websites interspersed with ads) or which have suboptimal formatting, such as centre-justified text with large or unequal-sized gaps between words. The latter is rarely a feature of paper-based texts.

Although the consequences of these two factors are under-researched, enough has been learned about human cognition to make informed predictions.

For example, images and audio unrelated to a text such as pop-up ads can capture attention. Although most adults have developed a level of executive control sufficient to ignore such distractions, young children have not.

The implications for a child who is struggling to understand the meaning of a text are obvious. Their comprehension will suffer to the extent that additional effort is required to ignore distractions, or if they do not yet have the mental coordination to understand the text has been disrupted.

There is also evidence from eye-tracking experiments that many digital environments, such as webpages, can induce specific reading strategies, such as skimming for gist or searching for information.

Although such strategies might be adaptive in some contexts, they reduce overall comprehension. This possibility should be especially concerning for children, because years of practice are needed to coordinate the mental systems that support adult levels of reading skill.

Such concerns have recently drawn more attention, because the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift to online education and a marked increase in digital reading. Although these changes were motivated by practical necessity, their long-term consequences remain unclear.

So far, eye-tracking research has been carried out on computer screens. New technology is becoming available which will allow us to directly compare eye movements and comprehension between digital devices and paper. This should give us more clarity about the benefits versus costs of digital devices.

Given reading ability is predictive of one’s education, socioeconomic status and wellbeing, the importance of assessing the long-term consequences of digital reading cannot be overstated.

Erik D Reichle, Professor of cognitive psychology, Macquarie University and Lili Yu, Senior Lecturer, Cognitive Psychology, Macquarie University

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

Ted Turner, who died on April 6, 2026, was bright, shrewd and, most of all, lucky. The cable TV visionary proved to be in the right place, at the right time, to change television and video news forever.

Most of his big gambles, on things such as the MGM studio and library, which led to the creation of the Turner Classic Movies channel, paid off handsomely.

But Turner will be remembered mostly for the creation and development of the Cable News Network – CNN – which launched in 1980 and made our knowledge of distant events instantaneous and our world more comprehensible. In this sense, Turner’s legacy extends beyond television. He changed our conception not only of journalism but also of our world.

Turner’s obituaries note his record-setting philanthropy, his impressive conservation efforts and his campaign to make the world safer by securing post-Soviet Union era nuclear weaponry. Over the course of his 87 years, Turner proved an outstanding yachtsman, an active and involved sports team owner and a quotable maverick in the business world.

Yet as a scholar of broadcast history – and a former CNN employee – I think Turner’s ultimate legacy is a bit more atmospheric than measurable.

He changed the media ecology in profound and lasting ways. CNN’s arrival disrupted an established media environment, in which broadcast journalism routines and audience viewing habits had become standardized by the ABC, CBS and NBC TV networks.

The ramshackle early CNN, with its farcical “world headquarters” housed in a former Atlanta-area country club, was derided as the “Chicken Noodle Network” by veteran network journalists. But by the mid-1980s it had established profitability, and by 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War, it assumed a singular position in America’s – and the world’s – information environment.

CNN had matured to respectability, and Turner was recognized as a visionary by Time magazine, which named him 1991’s Man of the Year. His idea had blossomed into a new arena for global information sharing, and his cable network fully competed with the established broadcast channels on big stories throughout the 1990s.

Right place, right time, right team

Turner’s cable TV news revolution required significant collaboration. The fulfillment of his vision needed luck, inherited money, innovative new technologies, supportive partners and even federal regulatory intervention.

For example, had Newton Minow’s Federal Communications Commission not pushed Congress to pass the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962, American TV manufacturers would likely never have placed the UHF dial on their sets. That UHF dial made additional local TV competition possible by allowing more stations to broadcast.

In 1970, Turner purchased UHF Channel 17 in Atlanta, which he named WTGC for “Turner Communications Group,” and UHF Channel 36 in Charlotte, North Carolina, which he named WRET for “Robert Edward Turner,” and began building his broadcasting empire.

By the mid-1970s, the cost of satellite distribution to cable system operators had decreased to such an extent that Turner realized – and seized – an opportunity to nationally distribute his local station. He worked with satellite and cable system operators, building early relationships that would prove beneficial to everyone in the cable industry as it developed over the 1980s and ’90s.

In 1979 and 1980, he used these relationships to build the first 24-hour TV network, but it was his internal hires that made the original channel function. To launch CNN, Turner hired veterans of the TV news business, including Robert Wussler, who had previously been president of CBS Sports and the CBS Television Network. And he hired Reese Schonfeld, who had previously founded the Independent Television News Association, a national syndicator of pooled local TV programming.

It was Turner’s vision, investments and established partnerships that made CNN possible. But the creation of the network proved a team effort requiring managerial competence and veteran television production experience.

CNN’s success was never assured. The channel continually lost money in its initial years. But the idea of 24-hour TV news being delivered to paying subscribers, through their cable system operators, proved so valuable that as early as 1981, two CBS executives secretly jetted to Atlanta to meet with Turner and Wussler about purchasing the network.

“I’ll sell you CNN,” he told them. But the deal floundered when the CBS executives would not accept anything less than 51% ownership – and control – of the channel. “You want control? You don’t buy control of Ted Turner’s companies,” he explained. “Forty-nine percent or less.”

Only four years later, Turner would turn the tables and attempt to take over CBS.

Turner came very close to living long enough to see CBS and CNN under a single ownership. CBS’ parent company, Paramount Skydance, is closing in on the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, the corporation that owns CNN.

Yet today, these two once hugely profitable news operations have been subsumed within massive multinational corporations, with their legacy brand equity providing as much value to their ownership as their journalism. Turner had long bemoaned the managerial fate of his cable news channel, which he sold to Warner Bros. in 1996.

Success invites criticism, establishes a legacy

Turner is one of the few figures in American media history who left a clearly identifiable legacy. There was a media world that existed before CNN and the one that came after. CNN’s success gave rise to competitors such as MSNBC, Fox News and others.

These channels simultaneously differentiated themselves from CNN while constantly measuring themselves against their older rival. But Turner’s original vision was distinct from the panel programs and punditry that’s now replaced original reporting from around the world.

Turner wanted to own and operate a global news organization where the news would always be the star, and where, like the classic wire services, professional reporting would be instant and accurate. And he wanted to make a fortune while doing it.

When he finally succeeded, critics began to complain about what journalist and academic Tom Rosenstiel called “The Myth of CNN” in a cover story in The New Republic in 1994. Scholars bemoaned CNN for its privileging good visuals over context and depth. They argued that its foreign coverage failed to maintain sufficient independence from the U.S. government.

Dictators and terrorists around the world learned to exploit CNN to get their messages across to the American public. In this sense, CNN’s neutrality, once a source of respect and credibility, could also undermine it by making the channel easily exploitable.

Billions of people around the world now take for granted the profusion of news access to anywhere on earth, at any time of day or night. That world was unimaginable before Turner’s work to make CNN conceivable and then real.

His legacy is not simply a series of cable channels but an entirely new way of thinking about information retrieval and access. Think about that the next time you scroll past video clips from London, Tokyo, Beirut or Mexico City, or check out breaking news videos from Ukraine or Tehran. And thank Ted for making such a world possible.

Michael J. Socolow, Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine

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

Sir David Attenborough turns 100 this week.

Very few people have the good fortune to live for a century. Fewer still achieve so much and touch so many lives.

Across his seven decade career with the BBC, Attenborough ushered in the transition from black and white to colour television. He gave the now legendary comedy troupe Monty Python their lucky break, greenlighting their Flying Circus. His keen eye and care for viewers is in part why tennis balls are yellow, not white – they’re much easier to see on screen.

But Attenborough is, of course, most famous for his nature documentaries. For decades, he has fronted the camera to educate, entertain and inspire billions of people about the complexity, wonder and majesty of the natural world, and the many threats it faces. It wasn’t a given – Attenborough was told early in his career his teeth were too big for television!

For ecologists like myself, Attenborough’s work has been a source of deep inspiration. It was instrumental in my decision to pursue a life and a career dedicated to understanding, caring and fighting for the protection of nature. For this gift, I am eternally grateful.

A career driven by curiosity

Attenborough’s connection with nature came early, forged in no small part through an insatiable fascination with fossils – including his childhood joy at discovering an ammonite in the Leicestershire countryside.

He went on to study geology and zoology at Cambridge University, graduating in 1947. He served in the navy and worked in an educational publishing house. Notably, the BBC rejected his first job application as a radio producer in 1950. But he tried again, and joined the BBC as a trainee producer in 1952.

His career in nature documentaries began to bud almost immediately, with his Zoo Quest series beginning in 1954. But it burst into full bloom with the landmark Life on Earth series in 1979, which brought distant locations, extraordinary wildlife and evolution and ecology to TV. It instilled a sense of wonder and awe in audiences, while maintaining and respecting scientific accuracy.

The master storyteller

One reason Attenborough has had such success as a communicator is his understated, calm but authoritative demeanour. When you sit down to watch an Attenborough documentary, you feel in safe hands.

His approach isn’t the norm. In other nature documentaries, wildlife can often seem secondary, as props for the presenter.

In series such as The Living Planet, The Trials of Life, The Blue Planet, The Planet Earth, and scores of others, Attenborough took us across the globe, revealing nature’s beauty, oddities and extraordinary complexity, as well as its macabre and brutal aspects. The habitats home to the world’s species are brought to life in extraordinary detail. We watch with laughter, trepidation, sadness, anger, excitement and awe, ebbing and flowing as nature’s stories unfold.

Who can forget the first time they saw and heard the extraordinary vocal repertoire and mimicry of a lyrebird, or a curious mountain gorilla’s desire to connect with a fellow great ape? The epic battle for survival between a hatchling iguana and hungry hordes of racer snakes? Or the breathtaking explosion of colour and complexity of a coral reef? Each of these was captured by master cinematographers and the story told to us by Attenborough.

Over his long career, Attenborough has become an icon. He was voted the UK’s best TV presenter of all time. But his prodigious output has come at a personal cost too. One of his regrets is how much time he has spent away from his family.

He is also not off limits to criticism. For a long time, Attenborough focused on the glory of nature, largely omitting the damage humans do through overfishing, deforestation, pollution, spreading exotic species, and other threats. He has also shied away from assigning blame to those most responsible for the harms inflicted on nature.

In 2018, he said too much focus on why so much wildlife is threatened was a “turn-off” for some viewers. Ecologists and conservation scientists can sympathise. We know bombarding people with doom and gloom invites apathy and despair, not a desire to act. It’s a hard line to walk between harsh realities and hope.

To his credit, Attenborough has belatedly focused on these issues in recent years. Footage of plastic pollution in Blue Planet II and the ravages of industrial fishing in Ocean have brought a sharp focus on these issues.

In 2020, he released A Life On Our Planet, which he describes as a “witness statement” to the startling losses of biodiversity he has seen over his lifetime. Rather than just spell out the problems, Attenborough laid out how to solve them – and the role we can all play in fixing the two biggest and deeply interwoven problems nature faces: climate change and biodiversity declines and extinctions.

While Attenborough’s earlier work largely avoided these difficult conversations, they succeeded in bringing nature’s wonder to millions of people. This shouldn’t be overlooked. At a time when more and more of us are cut off from nature, Attenborough’s documentaries forged a new connection. For people to care about losing nature, they first have to know and love it.

Conservation relies on stories

Scientific research rarely leads to the behavioural changes we might hope for. Accumulating facts and evidence is vital. But it’s not enough. What humans respond to is stories.

Alongside other globally renowned voices such as the late, great Jane Goodall, Attenborough’s work telling the stories of nature has shaped public opinion. In turn, it has galvanised conservation efforts such as the push to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

As he celebrates his centenary, it’s encouraging to see a new generation and diversity of voices in the media and science communication, advocacy, and scientific community. They speak and share their messages with great clarity, confidence, and passion.

Attenborough is just one person. He can’t replace the vital role of scientists, community leaders, conservationists and policymakers in conserving nature. But no one will ever replace David’s distinctive voice. As he has said:

it seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living

Hear, hear. Happy birthday for May 8th, David Attenborough.

Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

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

The use of dietary supplements has increased sharply in recent years. Vitamins, minerals and other nutritional products are often marketed as simple ways to boost energy, support immunity, protect brain health or even promote longevity. For many people, taking supplements can feel like a sensible, proactive health habit.

But this perception can be misleading. For people who already have adequate nutrition, many supplements offer little or no measurable benefit. Some are simply an unnecessary expense. Others are not risk-free: high doses of certain vitamins and minerals can cause toxicity, interfere with medications or produce unintended health effects.

For older adults, however, the picture is more complicated. The most useful question is not simply whether supplements are “good” or “bad”, but whether someone is actually deficient, what might be causing that deficiency and whether a supplement is the safest way to address it.

Nutritional deficiencies become more common with age. Appetite may decrease, oral health can worsen, chronic illnesses become more common and many older people take medicines that affect how nutrients are absorbed, used or cleared from the body. Oral health problems, including tooth loss, gum disease and poorly fitting dentures, can also make chewing difficult and reduce dietary variety.

Later life is often surrounded by unhelpful food messages: eat less, lose weight, avoid “heavy” meals, stick to soft foods. But these messages can collide with the body’s continuing need for protein, vitamins and minerals. Over time, small meals, soups, toast and tea can become a diet that fills the stomach without meeting nutritional needs.

This does not mean every older person needs supplements. It means supplementation should be targeted: based on confirmed deficiencies, clear risk factors, medication use or evidence that someone is not getting enough from food.

Vitamin B12 is one of the clearest examples. B12 deficiency becomes more common with age, partly because the stomach may produce less acid, which is needed to release B12 from food. Low B12 can cause anaemia, fatigue, nerve problems, numbness or tingling, and sometimes memory problems or confusion. Certain medicines, including metformin and proton pump inhibitors, can increase the risk further. High-dose oral B12 often works well, although some people need injections.

Folate is also important, especially for red blood cell formation and DNA production. Low folate can raise homocysteine, a blood marker that has been associated with cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline, though this does not prove that folate supplements prevent either. Folate or other B vitamins may help selected groups, such as people with low folate or B12 status, raised homocysteine or mild cognitive impairment. But B12 deficiency should be considered before folate is prescribed on its own, because folate can improve some blood signs of B12 deficiency while nerve damage continues.

Vitamin D is another common concern. Deficiency is more likely in older adults with limited sun exposure, reduced mobility, darker skin, care-home residence or diets low in vitamin D-rich foods. Supplementation may be appropriate when levels are low, sun exposure is limited, or someone has osteoporosis, recurrent falls or high fracture risk. But more is not automatically better. A large trial found that vitamin D supplementation did not significantly reduce fracture risk in generally healthy midlife and older adults who were not selected for deficiency.

Calcium and magnesium matter for bone, muscle and nerve function, but where possible they should come from food. Supplements may be useful when dietary intake is insufficient or osteoporosis is present, but excessive intake should be avoided. Magnesium is often promoted for sleep, but evidence for routine use as an insomnia treatment remains limited.

Multivitamins can be useful for older adults who eat very little or have poor dietary variety, but they should not be treated as nutritional insurance for everyone. In a large study of three US cohorts, daily multivitamin use was not associated with a lower risk of death. Other research is exploring whether multivitamins may affect markers of biological ageing, but it remains unclear whether this translates into better health, independence or lifespan.

One of the most overlooked “supplements” in later life is not a vitamin at all, but protein. Many older adults eat too little protein or avoid protein-rich foods such as meat, fish, eggs, dairy, beans or lentils. Low intake can contribute to sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength, increasing the risk of falls, frailty and loss of independence. Expert groups commonly recommend around 1.0 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day for healthy older adults. Higher intakes are sometimes needed during illness, frailty or recovery, unless someone has been advised to restrict protein because of kidney disease or another condition.

Unsupervised or excessive supplementation can be harmful. High doses of vitamin D or vitamin A can cause toxicity. Iron should not be taken without confirmed deficiency unless advised by a healthcare professional. Some supplements interact with medicines. And evidence reviews have found that some high-dose antioxidant supplements, particularly beta-carotene and vitamin E, may increase mortality risk in some populations.

A sensible approach begins with food, not pills. That means looking at appetite, weight change, chewing or swallowing problems, dietary variety, medical conditions, medication use and whether someone has enough support to shop, cook and eat well. Blood tests may be needed, particularly for vitamin B12, folate, iron and vitamin D.

Evidence does not support universal supplementation for all older adults. But targeted use of vitamin D, vitamin B12, folate and, in some cases, a multivitamin or protein supplement can help when deficiencies or low intake are present.

Supplements can have a role in healthy ageing, but they are not a shortcut. The foundations are still balanced nutrition, strength exercise, adequate sleep, social connection and access to good food. The best supplement is the one that answers a real need, not the one with the loudest promise on the label.

Miguel G. Borda, Consultant in Geriatric Medicine, Department of Neurology, Universidad de Navarra and George E. Barreto, Associate Professor in Cell Biology and Immunology, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Limerick

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

In April, the United Kingdom passed landmark laws that aim to create a “smokefree generation”. This means anyone born on or after January 1 2009 can never legally be sold tobacco products.

The law is a triumph for public health. And it puts the financial interests of the tobacco industry in the rear window.

Compare this to what happened on May 4, at a Senate inquiry into the illegal tobacco crisis in Australia. Tobacco giant Philip Morris Limited was not only invited to give evidence, but was permitted to do so behind closed doors without any public scrutiny.

Neither the original nor the revised speakers list mentions Philip Morris even appearing at the committee hearing.

Philip Morris was also permitted to give evidence behind closed doors to a New South Wales state parliament inquiry into the illegal tobacco trade in late February.

Having these sessions behind closed doors means Philip Morris could lobby privately for policies that would directly benefit the company, such as cutting tobacco taxes. It also allows Philip Morris to raise matters beyond what was included in its public submission.

Because Philip Morris’s testimonies were given behind closed doors, the media and the public have been unable to gauge the expertise of the witnesses who appeared. Nor can other witnesses and experts interrogate the evidence and policy advice the company presented to committee members.

Participating in regulatory review processes such as parliamentary inquiries isn’t the only way the tobacco industry tries to influence political decision-making. Tobacco companies deploy a number of strategies and interference techniques.

Here are the three most powerful tactics they use in Australia.

1. Political donations

The National Party is the last major Australian political party to accept tobacco industry political donations and membership fees. In 2024-25, the Nationals received A$137,500 from Philip Morris and $88,000 from British American Tobacco.

Labor stopped accepting donations from the tobacco industry in 2004 and the Liberal Party followed in 2013. The Greens have never accepted tobacco industry donations.

Australia has strong laws banning any sort of commercial sponsorship by tobacco and e-cigarette companies. But an exemption is granted for gifts, reimbursements and donations to politicians and political parties during election periods.

National peak health bodies have called for a universal, mandatory end to tobacco industry political donations. This is needed to protect public health from these vested interests.

2. Revolving door of lobbyists

The “revolving door” is when employees and elected representatives move back and forth and between positions in government and industry.

This lobbying tactic aims to gain and share insider knowledge of the policymaking process, develop ties and relationships with influential people, and establish quid pro quo contributions to industry. This could include pushing for policies such as reduced tobacco taxes and liberalised vaping regulations.

A research paper we co-authored found tobacco companies strategically use the revolving door to influence public health policy in Australia.

Almost half (48%) of internal tobacco company lobbyists and 55% of third-party lobbyists working on behalf of tobacco companies had held positions in the Australian government before or after working for the tobacco industry.

Many of these people moved into lobbying positions within one year of working in public office. This is despite the cooling-off periods outlined in the Lobbying Code of Conduct. These require a minimum of 12 months for senior public service and parliamentary employees, and 18 months for ministers and parliamentary secretaries, before taking up lobbying roles.

A 2024 parliamentary inquiry on lobbyist access to Australian Parliament House acknowledged the need for greater transparency. It recommended some improvements to processes and disclosures.

However, it did not endorse other significant recommendations that would have limited tobacco industry influence, such as not allowing former ministers and their staff to lobby their colleagues for the benefit of harmful industries.

3. Consultants and third-party organisations

A key tobacco industry tactic for resisting tobacco control is to recruit supposedly independent experts who are critical of tobacco control measures.

This practice can be extended to engaging seemingly neutral third parties, or creating new front groups or supposed advocacy groups, to push tobacco industry arguments and agendas.

In Australia, Philip Morris was exposed for funding a front group for vape retailers. It spent millions on external lobbyists to undermine vaping policy reforms ahead of a 2020 Senate inquiry.

British American Tobacco also subsequently set up and financed Responsible Vaping Australia – an astroturf campaign. This is where an industry-funded organisation is created to appear to represent the common concerns of everyday citizens. This particular campaign included paid social media advertisements that linked to a petition to allow retailers to sell nicotine vaping products.

Australian consultants linked to the commercial nicotine industry have advised on illicit tobacco solutions and policies both here and internationally.

Protecting public health

Australia is a party to the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. This includes a provision, known as Article 5.3, that requires public officials to protect public health policies “from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”.

Despite this requirement, Australia’s political processes remain acutely vulnerable to tobacco industry interference and influence.

All Australian governments need to commit to full transparency and accountability when engaging with the tobacco industry. Offering secret meetings to nameless individuals, under the guise of tobacco company employee safety and protection, is unethical.

This kind of secrecy is also disrespectful to the 24,000 Australians killed every year by the products this industry sells.

Becky Freeman, Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney and Christina Watts, Research Fellow in Public Health, University of Sydney

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

In the lead-up to the federal budget, there’s much focus on what the government will do to address cost-of-living pressures for households amid rising inflation and interest rates.

Research shows where those cost-of-living stresses are greatest. It’s not the vast bulk of middle-income Australia, but working-age welfare recipients.

It’s against this backdrop that the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee recently handed its 2026 report to government. It’s the fourth report in a row to recommend a substantial increase to JobSeeker: the payment that around 900,000 mostly unemployed, working-age Australians receive.

As everyday essentials get more expensive, this is the cohort that requires the most urgent attention in next week’s budget.

$272 extra per fortnight

The JobSeeker payment is the social security payment that is paid to working-age people, many of whom are unemployed. Some recipients are employed (likely on a part-time or casual basis) and some are not in the labour force.

The payment is heavily means-tested with a tight income test, an assets test and a liquid assets test, ensuring people eat away at their savings before receiving it.

While on the payment, recipients are often subject to “mutual obligations” requiring them to look for work and undertake training or other related activities.

In each of its last four reports, the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee has given the government the same recommendation. It suggests the payment be increased from its current rate of around $808.70 per fortnight to around 90% of the age pension – around $1,080.80. This would be a lift of around $272 per fortnight.

In 2023, the government did increase the payment by $40 a fortnight, which followed a slightly more generous increase by the former Morrison government of $50 per fortnight.

The payment is adjusted for inflation every six months. With strong inflation recently, these substantial increases have been largely cancelled out by cost of living increases. They don’t raise the payment in “real” (after inflation) terms.

No ‘real’ relief

The committee’s reports have considered a range of evidence to show that the payment is too low.

The primary concern is that living standards, wages and many other welfare payments have increased since the early 1990s by substantially more, as they match up to an economy that has grown substantially in “real” terms. JobSeeker recipients have missed out on the living standards growth of the Australian economy.

JobSeeker recipients also have much higher rates of financial stress than the rest of the population – around six times that of non-welfare recipients and ten times that of age pensioners.

The committee also heard from people who survive on the payment. These people have struggled financially, physically and mentally, linking some of these issues to the low rate of payment.

A short-term payment?

As the JobSeeker payment has become relatively less generous over time, the committee’s research also found it to be less fit for purpose.

The length of time people spend on the payment is increasing. This is likely because recipients are increasingly “partial capacity to work” recipients – those deemed by the government to have a limited capacity to work due to illness or physical disability.

In theory, JobSeeker is supposed to be a short-term payment. The payment is frugal by design, with the goal of incentivising people to work. Given it’s short-term, the payment doesn’t have to be as high as ongoing support payments, such as the age pension.

However, the structure of the payment has changed. In the 2024-25 financial year, around 30% of recipients were on the payment for five or more years. In 2012-13, this figure was around 20%.

An increasing share of recipients are unable to work full-time hours. The share of people only working part-time roughly doubled to 40% between 2012 and 2024.

This all calls into question the assumption that JobSeeker recipients have (or should have) short spells on the payment before quickly finding employment and shifting off the payment.

These are the options

It’s important that welfare payments, particularly for working-age people, are designed to ensure a strong incentive to find work. But these payments should also be decent enough to get by.

The Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee has made it quite clear that is not the case at the moment. It hasn’t been for several decades.

In designing cost-of-living relief for Australian households, the clearest need is for greater assistance to working-age welfare recipients.

While politically popular, recent attempts at cost-of-living relief, such as petrol excise cuts or energy rebates, are largely directed at people who would get by regardless and have little need for such assistance. These programs also work against the direction of monetary policy from the Reserve Bank.

Increasing the JobSeeker payment to the suggested 90% rate would cost around $6 billion per year. This is a permanent cost to the budget.

But the committee’s report provides a number of alternatives that cost roughly half this over the forward estimates (2026-29 financial years).

The first approach is to gradually increase the rate each year until it reaches 90% of the age pension by 2029.

A second approach would be to vary JobSeeker according to how many hours a person had a “partial capacity to work”, with more support for those who can work less.

These approaches don’t provide the ideal level of support, but would still provide substantially better immediate support to those most in need on the payment.

To date, the response from the Albanese government to the cost of living crisis has been mostly spread widely rather than targeted towards those most in need. Tuesday’s budget is an opportunity to fix a major problem with the welfare system for the most disadvantaged that has been well documented for decades. 

Ben Phillips, Associate Professor, POLIS@ANU Centre for Social Policy Research, Australian National University

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

There’s a growing awareness policy works best when shaped by the people and communities who have lived through the issues it aims to address.

If we don’t listen to and learn from those who have experienced issues such as homelessness, family violence, distress or trauma, we risk building systems that misunderstand the harm and the hope within those realities.

Across social and public sectors, new roles are being created for people with what is often called “lived expertise”.

These are people whose personal experience informs work to improve policy, practice and research. They are advising government departments, helping to design services, informing inquiries and guiding community initiatives.

But while lived experience is often invited into the room, we still know little about what it is like to work from that experience across distinct issue areas – and about the emotional toll, risks and challenges of trying to make change inside systems that actively resist it.

To explore this further, we spoke with ten lived experience leaders as part of our research, released today.

Deep commitment

The lived experience leaders we spoke with work alongside a range of communities – for example, First Nations peoples, incarcerated women and girls, those experiencing mental distress, young people, people from LGBTIQA+ communities and those impacted by family violence.

Our research revealed that these lived experience leaders are deeply committed to structural change. They carry hard-won knowledge and a strong determination to ensure others have better experiences.

One told us:

I came in with the motivation that there were so many people that this had happened to, and I wanted to change it.

Another said:

I don’t feel accountable to dominant systems […] What I feel accountable to feels greater than me – accountable to my ancestors and to those who come after me.

Influencing from the inside and outside

These leaders work across, between and beyond institutions – sometimes from the inside to influence change, other times building power outside them.

As one leader said:

I believe we need to build power ourselves and then the system will come to us for the answers, rather than us trying to fit into their structures and processes.

Moving between these spaces is not easy.

Another leader said:

We hold one shield that’s fending off the system and another shield that’s fending off the organisations we have to work with, and then another that’s defending victim-survivors. Then we don’t have anything left to protect ourselves.

Leaders are often drawing on collective experience, not just their own, and feel deep accountability to others, particularly those who share experiences of injustice and harm.

As one said:

I am accountable to the people at the end or the bottom – to service users and the people who have the most to lose.

Their approach intentionally challenges dominant hierarchies. They lead alongside others, guided by the quality of relationships they build – and by care, accountability and connection. One person told us:

I would never speak about women and girls in cages if I’m not being held accountable by the women and girls in cages […] Otherwise, you’re operating from a position of “power over” – and that’s not true leadership.

Hazards, harms and hope

Lived experience leadership can also carry risks. Many leaders spoke about being invited to contribute or “have a seat at the table” without being genuinely heard, or seeing action taken from their insights.

Participation often feels like a compliance exercise. Tokenism, they said, is still common. One person told us:

Something we don’t talk about enough is the price we pay for sharing our lived and living experience.

Another said:

We choose to do it because we genuinely care about people we’ve never met – because we want people to live, because we want the systems that continue to fail them to change.

The toll that takes – the exhaustion, the trauma that’s constantly brought up, the feelings of not being valued or considered – and yet still choosing to fight each day for the right reasons, is more than anyone could ever possibly imagine.

And yet, many leaders also spoke about hope. One person told us:

I do have some sort of hope most days […] This is love for, and belief in, our community. My hope is kept alive through contact with and service to my community.

Where to from here?

Our research shows lived experience leadership holds real potential to address the complex problems traditional approaches struggle to solve.

But this potential can only be fully realised when institutions recognise their own capacity to cause harm and begin to share power with those most affected.

Real progress means more than inviting lived experience into rooms or at tables – it means taking responsibility, acting on what’s heard and being changed by it.

As one leader urged:

Sometimes we have to demand the impossible […] Let those with institutional power worry about how they’re going to hold us back […] Most of the time, you sit at the table because collaboration is essential – but sometimes, you do have to flip it.

Lived experience leadership isn’t about earning a seat at someone else’s table.

It’s about questioning who built the table in the first place – and creating new spaces where power, decision-making and design are genuinely shared.

Morgan Cataldo, Visiting Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University; Kelsey Dole, Visiting Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University; Perrie Ballantyne, Visiting Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University; Robyn Martin, Associate Dean, Social Work and Human Services, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, and Suzi Hayes, Associate Lecturer, Social Work and Human Services, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

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

A national centre to detect and disrupt the threat of online violent extremism and terrorism is to be set up by the federal government, with next week’s budget providing $74 million over two years for it.

The Counter Terrorism Online Centre will be led jointly by ASIO and the Australian Federal Police. They will work with local and international law enforcement authorities. The initiative reflects the mounting concern about how young people can be manipulated online by those engaged in terrorism.

Last week the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion released its interim report. After reviewing classified information, it observed that despite an overall increase in funding for the national intelligence community, “the proportion of funding allocated to counter-terrorism significantly declined across the NIC over the period from 2020 to 2025”.

However, the interim report has left some important questions hanging. These include:

• In view of the raising of the terrorism threat in August 2024, did ASIO seek additional funding from the government for counter terrorism before either the budget update in late 2024 or the 2025 budget? If not, why not?

• did ASIO reprioritise its own spending to give greater attention to counter terrorism after the raising of the threat level? If not, why not?

The royal commission is expected to address these questions when ASIO gives evidence before it, and in its final report. In the meantime, what information it has in relation to them remains secret.

This week has seen Jewish witnesses appear before the commission telling of their experiences, often horrific, of antisemitism in Australia.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said that at the new centre, specialist counter-terrorism investigators and intelligence analysts would monitor high-risk online spaces, assess threats and coordinate disruption of extremist content and activity, including by covert online engagement.

Burke said that often gaming platforms were used to target and recruit people. Private chat groups acted as echo chambers.

The radicalisation of young people online shows in the numbers.

Under legislation that took effect in early 2024, covering prohibited hate symbols and other measures, 27 people have been charged with violent extremist material offences. Of these, 15 were aged 17 or under.

Burke said: “More young Australians are being radicalised online, and it happens fast.

"We already have centres dedicated to protecting children and combatting cyber crime; establishing a centre for online violence extremism and terrorism is the next logical step in a fast-moving threat environment.

"The capability we’ve always had to monitor extremists in the meeting room now extends to the chat room,” he said in a statement.

“Everyone needs to be alert to potential threats from terrorist and extremist organisations online and I urge anyone who sees something that raises concerns to contact the National Security Hotline”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

The Chinese-owned firm that operates the Port of Darwin isn’t happy about the federal government’s push to return it to an Australian owner. Now, the situation is escalating, with the stage set for an international legal showdown.

The Albanese government has been in talks with Landbridge Group, whose parent company is headquartered in Shandong province, China, to return the port to an Australian owner, following an election promise.

But in late April, Ye Cheng, the Chinese billionaire who founded Landbridge, initiated proceedings against Australia at a World Bank tribunal, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The government has said it will defend the claim.

This case may take years to resolve. But it’s not the only example of a Chinese company taking on a national government, claiming to be unfairly excluded based on national security or other concerns.

Right now, many of these cases are still pending. But these rulings could have major financial implications if they provide a route for Chinese firms to demand compensation from governments for any losses caused by political decisions.

How we got here

Back in 2015, Landbridge secured a 99-year lease to operate the port from the Northern Territory government, in a deal worth A$506 million.

The decision was not opposed at the time by the Turnbull federal government, although US President Barack Obama raised concerns, with US marines on rotation through the port.

Other groups also raised concerns about leasing the strategically important port to a Chinese firm. In the lead-up to the last federal election, both Labor and the Coalition committed to returning the port to an Australian owner if elected.

In a statement on the new proceedings, Landbridge said the move to return the port to an Australian owner was “discriminatory”. The company said it was “inconsistent with Australia’s obligations” under a major bilateral trade pact, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

In a statement, the federal minister for transport and infrastructure, Catherine King, said the government was “disappointed” by the decision to lodge a case. King said the government has been in “good faith discussions” to reach a “mutually acceptable deal” with Landbridge, and intended to continue these discussions.

An international investment umpire

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes was established in 1966.

Headquartered in Washington, this body exists to settle disputes between international investors and nation-states under bilateral investment treaties. This includes the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement at the centre of this case.

The centre provides an independent arbitration panel for each dispute, not including the two countries involved.

The panel ultimately decides whether there has been unfair treatment. If so, it rules on whether a government’s proposed action should be halted or reversed, or if a company deserves compensation.

Pending cases

Since 2021, 11 cases have been brought by Chinese companies against different governments around the world. Eight of these are pending.

Many of these cases centre on purely economic claims of being treated unfairly. For example, in one case, a Chinese-owned lithium company is seeking compensation following the Mexican government’s decision to nationalise its lithium mining industry and expropriate the company’s planned mine in Mexico.

But others, like the Landbridge case, centre on claims a government has overreached by excluding a company based on national security concerns.

One of the most high-profile is a case launched by Huawei against the Swedish government in 2022. This came after Sweden banned Huawei and ZTE (another Chinese telecom company) from participating in the country’s 5G rollout, citing national security concerns.

Huawei is seeking compensation of US$569 million (about A$790 million) for the market losses it claims will result from this exclusion.

If the tribunal finds in favour of Huawei in this case, it could lead to further actions launched against countries (including Australia) where Huawei was banned. It could also impact other Chinese companies that have lost markets due to national security concerns.

The question of fairness

In its statement on the new proceedings, Landbridge said it had won the lease through a “fair, open and competitive process”.

It said the government’s own reviews did not find a national security risk.

Landbridge is likely to argue this means the government’s decision to exclude them is arbitrary. They are also likely to argue a forced sale would bring a lower price, and the government therefore owes the company compensation.

Compensation, if awarded, can include not just the current value of the port lease but also potential future earnings that have been forfeited due to a forced sale.

The rules-based order

The increase in Chinese companies using panels like the World Bank’s to resolve their disputes demonstrates their commitment to this international institution that was established with US and Australian support to enforce the rules-based international trading system.

These disputes may not prevent governments from making decisions based on national security. But they may cause them to think twice about the financial implications of those decisions.

Colin Hawes, Associate professor of law, University of Technology Sydney

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

Words escape you. Your skin tingles. You are overwhelmed by how small and insignificant you really are, bursting with a feeling that is hard to define. This is awe.

Awe is a complex emotional state we experience when the enormity of what we see or feel transcends what we understand. It can be positive or negative.

Astronauts report this feeling when confronted with the vastness of space and Earth’s puny place within it. This experience – sometimes known as the “overview effect” – can change forever how people who’ve seen Earth from afar think about life here.

But you don’t have to travel to the moon and back to experience awe. Beautiful art, a walk in nature or dancing in a crowd can give you this overwhelming, transcendent feeling.

Neuroscience suggests experiences of awe can be good for your mental health – when they’re positive. So, when is awe good for us? And what exactly is going on in the brain?

Awe can be both positive and negative

Positive awe is what probably comes to mind when most people think of awe. If you’ve ever been moved by something immense and beautiful – such as a majestic mountain or sunset – you’ve likely experienced this sense of calm and wonder.

However, psychologists sometimes describe awe as an experience at the boundary of pleasure and fear. Both pleasure and fear can result in similar bodily arousal – racing heartbeat, goosebumps and chills – but the way we interpret this as an emotion will depend on the context. It can be the same when we experience something vast and overwhelming.

Negative awe may occur when we feel threatened or a lack of control, such as during an earthquake or terrorist attack.

Imagine standing in front of a tsunami and seeing it come towards you. You may feel powerless and filled with dread, while also overcome with a sense of insignificance in the face of nature’s majesty and power. This is the complexity of awe.

Trying to make sense of the unexpected

Our brains are constantly making predictions and integrating our experiences into what we already know.

We tend to “filter out” sensory signals that match our expectations, to instead focus on being ready to respond to information that is surprising.

New information is processed by parts of the brain that help to fit it within our pre-existing understanding of the world, knowledge frameworks known as schemata (or schemas).

According to schema theory, we either assimilate this new information into an existing schema, or have to change the schema to fit the new knowledge.

Not all new experiences will evoke awe. It occurs when we experience both the inability to assimilate an experience into current knowledge and a sense of vastness.

For example, you might have a schema for “waterfall” – a mental framework of what you expect (rocks, water, beautiful). But confronted by the roar of Victoria Falls, its size and velocity, the way the sun hits the spray, you experience awe; it’s unlike any waterfall you have ever seen and is beyond your expectations.

What happens in the brain when we experience awe?

When we feel awe, activity decreases in the brain regions associated with internal or self-referential processing. This network is what drives our memory and understanding of our place in the world.

When activity in these regions decreases, there is a shift away from yourself towards processing external information. This may explain why you tend to “feel small” when you experience awe.

But positive and negative awe may have different effects on our nervous system.

Negative awe is associated with sympathetic nervous system activity, which drives our “fight or flight” response.

Positive awe, however, is associated with increased parasympathetic activity. This reduces heart rate and arousal, which is why we may feel calmer.

How awe can be good for us

If you’re someone who seeks out experiences bigger than yourself – hiking for breathtaking views, enjoying meditation, art or losing yourself in the roar of a crowd – you probably already know awe can make you feel fantastic.

Now, research is exploring why. Emerging evidence suggests awe may be good for mental health and wellbeing in five ways:

1. improving your nervous system’s ability to relax
2. diminishing self-focus
3. making us more likely to help other people
4. connecting us to others
5. increasing sense of meaning.

More work needs to be done before we can say whether awe results in long-lasting benefits. But purposefully seeking awe may help you feel less stressed, more satisfied and happier.

Finding awe in the everyday

What evokes awe will likely be different for different people. But we know some things are more likely to induce this complex feeling, such as experiences of art, music and natural environments that move us.

Many people also find awe in collective experiences, especially those involving shared music or movement, or religious rituals. These help us transcend ourselves and become part of something bigger. Contemplating inspiring and complex “big” intellectual ideas by learning something new may also have this effect.

So, can you actively cultivate awe? One way to start is by taking “awe walks”. These involve walking with the intention of noticing beauty, vastness and wonder. Connecting with your own sense of spirituality – even if you are not religious – can also evoke awe.

In many cases, the vast and overwhelming experience of awe can start with simple acts of noticing.

Nikki-Anne Wilson, Lecturer, School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney; Neuroscience Research Australia

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

You are “coming down with something”. Maybe you have a scratchy throat and body aches. You have an old, combination flu/COVID rapid antigen test in the cupboard.

Should you use it to see if you have the flu? Will it detect the “super-K” flu you’ve heard about? Or is it worth seeing a doctor for a test instead?

Here’s what to know about testing for flu at home.

Remind me, how do we test for flu?

There are two main ways to test for flu.

The reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction test is known as RT-PCR or, more commonly, just PCR. This is what your GP orders after taking a swab of your nose and back of the throat. This test detects viral genetic material.

But rapid antigen tests or RATs are the type you do at home. These detect particular viral proteins (antigens) in your saliva or nasal secretions.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration lists RATs currently approved in Australia to detect respiratory viruses.

You can check your test against the list. This includes tests that detect various combinations of influenza (types A and B), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), adenovirus (listed as ADV) and COVID.

Which test is best?

Both types of tests have their pros and cons. So here are some things to consider.

Speed

RATs are quick and you can do them at home. Once the sample is in the device, you will generally have your result in 15–20 minutes. You won’t need to make and attend a GP appointment. An at-home test means you are also not inflicting your germs on the GP, staff or other patients in the waiting room.

A PCR test takes longer. First you have to wait for a GP appointment. Then, you may have to wait several days for the results.

Cost

The cost of both tests can differ. A combination flu/COVID RAT can cost a few dollars, less per test if you buy in packs of five or more.

You would not usually be charged for a PCR test in Australia. However, if your doctor does not bulk bill, you will have to pay an out-of-pocket fee for the medical appointment itself.

Accuracy and the super-K variant

PCR tests are more accurate than RATs, and can detect a viral infection when your viral load (the amount of virus present) is much lower that what a RAT can detect. This is because the PCR process copies a section of the viral genome many times to make it more easily detectable.

So a negative RAT is no guarantee you don’t have the flu. If your symptoms continue and you are concerned, a PCR will provide a more accurate answer.

But can RATs detect new variants of the flu virus? Fortunately, RATs detect “highly conserved” proteins. These are proteins that tend to be stable between different variants. A new variant should not interfere with the sensitivity of the RAT – its ability to correctly detect the flu.

So it’s likely that a flu RAT can detect the new H3N2 subclade K influenza variant, dubbed “super-K”, although no data have been published on this yet.

What if I’m at high risk?

People 65 or older, young children, pregnant women, and people taking immunosuppressive medications (such as, transplant recipients, or those having chemotherapy for cancer) are at greater risk of having more serious illness if they catch the flu.

In these higher-stakes situations, it might be better to see a GP as they can prescribe anti-flu drugs as a precaution.

These drugs may reduce the severity and duration of illness, and the risk of complications and hospitalisation associated with the flu.

If you decide to see your GP, let the surgery know you have symptoms. You may need to do an online consultation or wear a mask in the waiting room.

Are old RATs OK?

Before using a RAT that has been sitting in your cupboard, ensure it is within its use-by date and has been stored appropriately. If you have refrigerated the test, leave it at room temperature for about 30 minutes before using, otherwise it won’t work properly.

I’ve written previously about other do’s and don’ts of using RATs, including how to avoid sampling snot and how best to dispose of the test.

To detect flu it’s best to test within three to four days of symptoms starting. At this point the viral load will be highest and the test will be most accurate.

In a nutshell

If you have symptoms of a respiratory illness, and you want to see what you have, using a RAT is a good idea. That’s as long as the test has not expired, has been stored correctly and you are not in a high-risk group.

If it’s likely flu could be more serious for you (or someone you may be in contact with), a GP appointment may allow you to access anti-viral medications to reduce your risk of severe illness, and a PCR test would offer a more accurate diagnosis.

Thea van de Mortel, Professor Emerita, Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University

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

You’re standing in a supermarket aisle, weighing up whether to buy a microwave meal or a bunch of fresh carrots.

We all know making healthy eating choices can be tough. That’s especially true if you are hungry, or have a hungry household to feed.

There are so many reasons for this, and many are outside our control. But one you might not be aware of is a psychological concept known as “decision fatigue”.

So what exactly is decision fatigue? And could it help or hinder your healthy eating goals?

What is decision fatigue?

Decision fatigue, also known as choice overload, describes what happens when we make many effortful decisions over time.

Whenever you make a decision, you use a small amount of mental energy. As that energy runs low, you tend to make worse decisions.

This means you’re more likely to act without thinking, or simply choose what is easy or familiar. You might also find it harder to plan ahead and resist certain impulses.

This means you might be more likely to grab a takeaway instead of the ingredients to make a meal, or default to familiar comfort foods instead of making intentional, healthy choices.

How might it affect my eating habits?

The average person makes hundreds of food decisions each day.

You may think you’re just choosing a meal. But that one decision involves making many layered choices about what and how much you eat, as well as where, when and how you eat it.

You may make these choices subconsciously or automatically. But they each require to you weigh up various factors, such as taste, costs, time, expectations and more.

When decision fatigue sets in, you’re less likely to make thoughtful, health-focused choices. Instead, you may gravitate towards options that require less effort and offer quick rewards. You may also become more influenced by outside cues. An example of this is advertising that promotes convenient but high-calorie options such as fast food, snacks or indulgent treats.

Having too much information can make these decisions even harder. Nutrition advice often assesses the value of foods by how much protein, fat, fibre or vitamins they contain. This way of thinking, sometimes called nutritionism, can make food choices more complex. Instead of choosing food as food, we try to calculate and juggle many numbers at once.

Not the only factor

Several other factors may affect your food choices.

One is stress. One study from 2022 showed parents who experience high levels of both stress and decision fatigue found it more difficult to stick to positive food-related behaviours, such as making meals from scratch or eating together as a family.

Another is tiredness. One 2017 study showed time of day affected meal choices. It found between mealtimes, and especially in the afternoon, people were more likely to choose the simpler default food choice than one that required more consideration. This suggests having lower blood sugar and less mental energy meant people made less considered decisions.

How can I reduce my decision fatigue?

Here are four tips.

Have healthy foods on hand

When we’re low on mental or physical energy, we usually turn to what’s easy or familiar. That’s why it’s important to have healthy food options within reach. Thankfully, this doesn’t need to be complicated. It could look like pre-cutting fruit or having some healthy frozen meals in the freezer. And research suggests removing unhealthy foods – for example from the pantry or fridge – can be just as helpful when you’re trying to make healthier food choices.

Plan your meals

Planning meals could help too. This may involve setting some weekend time aside to decide what meals you’ll cook and eat. That’s instead of making last-minute decisions at the supermarket or on the drive home. Meal kits and batch cooking, which both reduce the number of food-related decisions you have to make, may also reduce decision fatigue.

Reframe your eating choices

How you frame choices may also improve your eating habits. For example, you may be more likely to “eat a colourful meal” rather than simply telling yourself to “eat more vegetables”.

Outsource some of the decision-making

If you’re looking for healthy, tasty recipes, you don’t need to re-invent the wheel. You can find a wealth of free ideas on the Eat for Health, Heart Foundation and National Nutrition Foundation websites. And if making food decisions feels overwhelming, Accredited Practicing Dietitians and Registered Nutritionists can help you turn complex nutrition advice into manageable steps.

The bottom line

We often think eating should be simple and intuitive, but blame ourselves when it doesn’t feel that way. However, the concept of decision fatigue shows healthy eating is not just about willpower. It’s also about noticing when you’re tired, stressed or time-poor, and taking practical steps to make healthy foods the easiest option.

Emma Beckett, Senior Lecturer, Nutrition and Food Science, Australian Catholic University

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

Between 2011 and 2021, the number of professional artists, writers, musicians and performers living in Greater Sydney shrank by 17% – even as overall employment increased by 20%.

This didn’t happen anywhere else in Australia. On the contrary, most of the other capital cities had growth of artists above the rate of employment.

Among Sydney’s policy makers and art sector, there’s an entrenched belief the decline is specific to the inner city, with increasingly diverse artistic communities migrating out to the western suburbs.

But the data consistently shows the opposite: the artist population fell in all areas of Sydney, becoming less diverse, both racially and economically. And a new survey suggests things are probably getting worse.

Exploring the data

I first saw this trend in 2021, analysing data from that year’s census. I wasn’t surprised. Working in the cultural strategy team at the City of Sydney we’d already seen the drop in the 2016 census. Our own research showed a 28% decline in creative spaces – studios, rehearsal rooms, small galleries and venues.

Still, so many people insisted Western Sydney’s creative community was growing that I tried cutting the data in different ways. I always came up with the same results.

As the census only allows you to list one profession, and most artists have day jobs, I also checked the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ participation in select cultural activities data. That shows both “participation” and “paid participation” across a variety of art forms.

But the trend was the same: an overall decline across Greater Sydney, not an outward migration. Proportionally, more artists now lived in the inner city.

Western Sydney’s artists did show greater signs of cultural diversity, but it was relative. You can see this better if you look for “homogeneity” rather than “diversity”.

In the census, there’s an over-representation of artists who list their ancestry as either “British” or “Australian”, excluding those who identify as Indigenous. In 2021, this Anglo-Australian demographic made up 43% of Greater Sydney’s population, but for artists it was 63%. In Western Sydney, it was 37% of the whole population, and 59% of artists.

That means Anglo-Australian artists were over-represented by about 20% in Greater Sydney, and 22% in Western Sydney. Although the portion of Anglo-Australians declined across both areas between 2011 and 2021, the rates of over-representation remained consistent.

Measuring incomes

I also worked through a range of income stats, which produced another surprise: professional artists were uniformly over-represented in higher income households, across all regions.

It seems counter intuitive. David Throsby and Katya Petetskaya’s 2025 report for Creative Australia found artist incomes were “notoriously unstable and uncertain”, well below the average income.

But they also found “one quarter of artists depend on the support of a partner or family member”. Other research supports this finding, with artists more likely to be in a marriage or de facto relationship than the rest of the working population.

This is probably what we see within the household income data: below average personal income is offset by higher family or partner income. This support has probably grown more important as living costs have increased.

Surveying artists on housing and income

In 2025, to understand how household income, ancestry and geographic location impacted on creative practice, my colleagues and I released our own survey.

Of the 300 professional artists who responded, 57% were considering leaving Greater Sydney, and 80% had colleagues who had already left. You could see why. Housing costs were, on average, around 40% of income. We used an existing formula to estimate workspace costs: artists were paying three times more than they could afford for studios and rehearsal rooms.

After factoring in housing, workspace, tax and the expenses of art practice, the average professional artist was living on somewhere between A$7,816 and $10,640 per year. That’s not viable in a place like Sydney.

We also included questions on annual income. Compared to Throsby and Petetskaya, we found artists earned less from their art, and were more reliant on other income sources. Only around 20% of professional artists had received funding from state or local governments, and only 13% from federal sources.

The sample size was too small to be certain, but it looked like the people who did get funding were concentrated in inner city locations, and came from the narrower racial and household income cohort.

The changing face of the artist

Living and housing costs have an obvious impact on who gets to make art, or at least who gets to do so professionally. As those costs have eclipsed even the most generous funding programs, Australian arts policy is probably losing its impact and pooling resources within demographics who are economically better insulated.

This explains the homogeneity I observed among higher income, inner city households, which skew towards Australian and British ancestry. Artists haven’t migrated outward to places with cheaper rent. They’re coming from demographic clusters where rent isn’t so much of an issue.

None of this is specific to Sydney. The city has been ahead of the bell curve on housing and living costs for a long time but is no longer unique. In the lead-up to the 2026 census, people are already assuring me artists have moved to Melbourne, or Brisbane or Hobart. You could make that case out of the 2021 census data, but those figures are five years old.

Housing and living costs have gone up across Australia, and cultural policy is surprisingly uniform across state lines. When the next batch of data comes out, it may well show the trend has spread beyond Sydney.

Ianto Ware, Honorary Associate, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

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

The ABC has revealed a major cybersecurity flaw in Bluetooth-enabled police tasers and body-worn cameras that means officers can be tracked.

The exposé shows how anyone can use simple software tools to detect the presence of a police officer carrying one of these pieces of equipment. Not only can you detect their presence, but it is possible to track their location over time – representing a potential threat, especially to those operating covertly.

But if police equipment can be tracked via Bluetooth, what about your phone, watch and headphones which use the same technology? Can they also be used to track you using simple software tools?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is a bit more complicated.

How does Bluetooth work?

Bluetooth is a short-range wireless communication technology that enables devices such as phones and speakers to connect with each other.

To effectively communicate, Bluetooth devices have a unique address – a bit like a phone number. These addresses are represented as 0s and 1s in their digital form. But they are typically viewed in hexadecimal, using the digits 0–9 and letters A–F (for example “00:25:DF:68:5D:1F”).

Each device has a distinct address. But these addresses are distributed to manufacturers in blocks, in a similar way that our phone numbers are grouped by geography.

As such, it’s possible to identify a Bluetooth device’s manufacturer by monitoring and detecting the signals being broadcast (sometimes called sniffing). This sniffing is usually over a short distance, but can be undertaken over longer distances with the right equipment.

A Bluetooth device address typically includes two parts: the manufacturer’s code and a unique device code. Once you know the manufacturer’s code you can easily identify devices they make by simply listening for their Bluetooth traffic.

How are police being tracked?

Police officers across Australia are issued with tasers and body-worn cameras manufactured by Axon, a US-based weapons and technology company.

These devices use Bluetooth as part of their operation. But a flaw allows anyone within a few hundred metres to be able to detect the presence of Axon technology. By listening to Bluetooth communications and filtering for the known manufacturer’s code, anyone can “detect” an officer carrying the Axon products. With enough monitoring stations, you can track officers across a geographical area.

At first glance it may seem odd that Bluetooth should feature on a taser. But there is a genuine benefit.

According to Axon, sensors integrated in the Axon product range can generate alerts over Bluetooth. For example, removing a gun from a holster or enabling a taser can alert nearby body-worn cameras to start recording.

While the general public has only just learned of the vulnerabilities in Axon’s equipment, police and some in academic and tech circles have known about them for longer. The ABC reports, for example, that Victoria Police were notified in 2024.

A Facebook page and a couple of GitHub repositories where code and files are stored and publicly available (for example PoliceDetector and JudCrandall) have been active for some time, with computer code available since September 2023.

While Axon indicates that devices can have firmware upgrades, it’s not clear if this extends to Bluetooth functionality. As a highly integrated device, the Bluetooth functionality may be hard-coded into the technology and may not be upgradeable.

So it’s possible the only solution would be to replace the devices or find some mechanism to disable the Bluetooth functionality – something that may reduce safety and accountability.

So, can any Bluetooth device be tracked?

In principle, yes.

Any device that emits a radio-frequency signal (such as WiFi, Bluetooth or 5G) can be detected with appropriate hardware. Unique identifiers are used for many kinds of wireless communication.

If you build up a list of these identifiers, you have the ability to track devices. And if you can link devices to people, you can track people.

If you are using wireless communications you can certainly be detected. But most modern devices such as iPhones have privacy modes that create random addresses. This ensures that most devices aren’t trackable in the same way the Axon devices are.

It is, however, possible that less sophisticated devices (such as the cheap earbuds you bought online) will not support random addressing.

While this means they are likely trackable, walking around with a mobile phone continuously transmitting and receiving is already ensuring you are very visible.

Unless you go completely offline, you can’t completely eliminate the risk of being tracked. If you are worried about being tracked, one step you can take is turning off WiFi and Bluetooth when not in use.

But remember there are many other ways we can be surveilled in our modern lives.

Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University

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

You’ve probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This effect, often playfully referred to as typoglycemia, is frequently shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work.

But this viral claim is only part of the story. To understand why it works, we need to look at how the brain actually processes written language.

There is no magical ‘rule’

The claim that usually accompanies this snippet is that as long as the first and last letters of a word are in the right place, the order of the middle letters doesn’t matter.

At first glance, the claim seems plausible.

But while there is a kernel of truth here, the explanation is misleading.

Reading scrambled words has much less to do with a magical “rule” about first and last letters, and much more to do with how our brains use context, pattern recognition and prediction.

We don’t read letter by letter

When we read, we typically don’t painstakingly process each letter in sequence. Instead, skilled readers recognise words rapidly by drawing on multiple cues at once. Psycholinguistic research shows that we process words as patterns rather than as sequences of individual sounds.

These include familiar letter patterns, the overall shape of the word and, crucially, the context of the sentence. Our brains are constantly predicting what is likely to come next, then checking those predictions against the visual input.

This is why we often miss typos in our own writing. We don’t see what’s actually on the page, we see what we expect to be there.

The same principle helps us make sense of jumbled words. Even when letters are out of order, enough of the structure remains for the brain to make an educated guess.

Word shape and structure matter

The viral meme suggests that only the first and last letters matter.

But this oversimplifies what’s really going on. We are sensitive to how letters relate to each other within a word. Common spelling patterns and familiar combinations make words easier to recognise, even when slightly distorted.

This is also why certain visual disruptions make reading harder. Text in alternating caps, such as “AlTeRnAtInG CaPs”, is difficult to process because it disrupts the usual visual contour of words. The same goes for “ransom note” lettering made from mismatched fonts, which interferes with pattern recognition.

In other words, readability depends on preserving enough of a word’s internal structure, not just its outer letters.

Not all scrambled text is readable

If the meme were true, any sentence with intact first and last letters should be easy to read. But that’s not what we find.

Take this example:

Salhal I cmorape tehe to a srmmeus day

It follows the supposed “rules”, yet it is much harder to decipher. In fact, this is the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

So why is the viral paragraph so much easier to read? Because it has been carefully (if unconsciously) engineered to be readable.

The hidden tricks behind the meme

Several factors make the famous example easier to process than it appears.

First, many of the words are short, which limits how many possible combinations the letters could form. Words like “you” and “can” are often left unchanged.

Second, function words such as “the”, “and” and “is” are usually intact. These small, common words provide the grammatical scaffolding of the sentence, making it easier to predict what comes next.

Third, when longer words are scrambled, the changes are often minimal. Adjacent letters are swapped (“wrod” for “word”), which is much easier to process than more extreme rearrangements.

Finally, the passage itself is highly predictable. Once you recognise the topic and rhythm, your brain fills in the gaps automatically, much as it does when listening to speech in a noisy environment.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is context. Words are not processed in isolation. Each word is interpreted in relation to the others around it, and within a broader framework of meaning.

This allows us to compensate for missing or distorted information.

But there are limits. As scrambling becomes more extreme, or as words become less predictable, comprehension quickly breaks down. Reading speed also slows noticeably, even when we can still make sense of the text.

Humans and machines

Interestingly, computers can now unscramble jumbled words with remarkable accuracy. By analysing probabilities and patterns across large datasets, algorithms can determine the most likely original form of a word or sentence.

In this sense, machines and humans rely on similar principles. Not rigid rules about letter position, but flexible systems that weigh patterns and probabilities. This highlights why the “typoglycemia” claim is an oversimplification, rather than a scientific rule.

The idea persists because it captures a genuine insight in a catchy way. It reveals that reading is not a simple, letter-by-letter process, but a dynamic interaction between perception and expectation.

At the same time, it’s a reminder of how easily scientific ideas can be distorted as they spread online.

So yes, we can often read scrambled words. But not because the order of letters doesn’t matter. It’s because our brains are remarkably good at making sense of imperfect information. So good, in fact, that they can turn a mess into meaning.

Karen Stollznow, Research Fellow of Linguistics, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University; University of Colorado Boulder

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

Taiwanese pop music superstar Jay Chou, known in Mandarin as Zhou Jielun (周杰倫), has put country Victoria’s Sovereign Hill on the map.

Chou’s 25 albums have sold more than 30 million copies, and the music video for his latest hit, Gold Rush Town (淘金小鎮) was filmed in the open-air museum.

With over 9 million views on YouTube, the video offers a global audience for both Sovereign Hill and the Chinese Australian experience.

Chinese people and the Australian gold rush

Gold Rush Town marks the first time a pop superstar has told the history of Australia’s gold rush through Chinese eyes. But the Sovereign Hill museum has an admirable record of including the history of Chinese people during the Australian gold rush.

Led by historian Anna Kyi, the museum’s Chinese exhibits exemplify a new push in Australian heritage to rediscover the foundational role played by Chinese migrants in Australian history using Chinese-language sources.

The museum’s “Chinese camp” was opened in 2024, promoting the multi-ethnic nature of the goldfields and the rich cross-cultural relations that developed as a result.

Tens of thousands of Chinese came to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s, interacting with people from all over the world.

The music video features Chou as a sharply dressed Chinese detective, walking stick in hand, chasing down Chinese bank robbers through the twists and turns of a frontier town in which the main characters are ethnic Chinese.

The Chinese in Ballarat were a prominent community in the 1850s. They made up 25% of the community, and may have been the majority in some areas of the colony. As late as 1871 – after the end of the city’s gold rush – 14% of men over 15 in Ballarat were Chinese.

Some Chinese Australians became wealthy during the Gold Rush. Chinese locals showed off their wealth just as Europeans did, with swagger and style and public display.

While stereotypes of Chinese as miners and market gardeners have some basis, many were involved in all variety of occupations, including police work.

Detective Fook Shing served on the Victorian police force from the 1860s to the 1880s, solving crimes across the colony and even as far off as Sydney.

Chou also plays a detective in the video clip – and you can clearly see the similarities between Fook Shing and Chou’s character.

Sharing an Australian Chinese story

Despite the intense political scrutiny for artists trying to maintain popularity on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, Chou has managed to avoid being boxed into a political position. He has carefully crafted an audience of everyone from Chinese ultra-nationalists and Taiwanese independence sympathisers.

Those trying to emphasise his politics often refer to a deliberately ambiguous 2007 quote: “Of course I’m Chinese. I’m also Taiwanese.”

Gold Rush Town has been incredibly popular on Chinese-language social media, spawning dozens of commentary videos and covers on popular sites such as BiliBili.

While The Ballerat Courier has reported the clip could be “boosting Ballarat’s tourism industry”, we haven’t seen any evidence of this on social media. Indeed, many international Chinese speakers are commenting that the video was filmed in Melbourne – 90 minutes’ drive away.

Without travel to Sovereign Hill being part of the social media buzz, it seems unlikely the video will lead to huge tourist numbers beyond the small bump this month.

But the video’s value isn’t in tourism. Chou’s video highlights a shared Chinese and Australian past and a common humanity at a time of rising diplomatic tension between China and the West.

Chou has pushed the memory of the Chinese Australian gold rush experience away from simplistic discussions of racism, and towards the complicated and multifaceted experiences of real people in the 1850s.

The video shows Chinese Australians as gold rush pioneers, rather than gold rush victims. Heroes in the national story, rather than marginal players.

People in China and Taiwan may not even register this as an Australian music video. But Chinese speakers in Australia will recognise the iconic location and the significance of this shifting history.

Gold Rush Town marks an important moment for Asia-Australia cultural relations, with a popstar bringing Chinese Australian history into the light in a positive way. We have come a long way from the 1983 filming of David Bowie’s quasi-racist China Girl in Sydney’s Chinatown.

Sophie Loy-Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Australian History, University of Sydney and Craig A. Smith, Associate Professor of Translation Studies, The University of Melbourne

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

The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) has become a mythic cinematic character. The magazine editor is icy, commanding, manipulative, cruel, oddly sympathetic and endlessly imitated.

Streep’s portrayal was surprisingly inspired by the quiet authority of powerful men such as Clint Eastwood. Her Miranda is soft but steely, controlled rather than overtly theatrical.

The trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 proudly proclaims “Icons Reign Forever”. This certainly holds true for the original film, 20 years later.

The film still feels urgent

Set at Runway Magazine – a stand-in for Vogue – The Devil Wears Prada tells a timeless story saturated with workplace toxicity, psychological manipulation, burnout culture and the quiet tyranny of demanding bosses.

In a glamorous New York setting, the 2006 film features a strong four-hander character structure. We have the coming-of-age for Andy (Anne Hathaway); the fierce professional ambition of Emily (Emily Blunt); the thwarted loyalty of Nigel (Stanley Tucci); the devastating private unravelling of Miranda.

The tension between ambition and personal values has only intensified in the two decades since the film’s release, as evident by 2022’s “quiet quitting” movement, transforming The Devil Wears Prada into an emblematic snapshot of modern working life.

Miranda also highlights a set of cultural debates that remain stubbornly unresolved: is she a cruel boss or simply uncompromising? Would anyone object to her leadership style if she were a man? Does Andy ultimately betray her own values, or reaffirm them?

The absence of definitive answers is precisely what has kept the film alive in the public consciousness. The film sheds light on the brutality of professional hierarchies in ways that feel even more urgent now than they did in 2006.

Fashion as character

Thanks largely to the work of costume designer Patricia Field (whose work for Sex and the City was legendary), along with actual runway show footage, fashion titan Valentino playing himself, and clothing and accessories loaned by iconic fashion houses, The Devil Wears Prada is the preeminent film about fashion to have captured the public imagination.

Many still consider the cerulean speech, partly devised by Streep, the most incisive piece of fashion-industry commentary ever committed to screen. Its deadpan delivery demystifies fashion’s power structure while simultaneously validating it, showing how consumer choice is largely an illusion.

(Streep even donned) the famous cerulean jumper in Prada 2 interviews.)

The original film portrayed fashion’s glamour and excess as simultaneously dazzling and damning.

But the eager return of fashion houses including Dior, Lanvin, Fendi, Gucci, Jean Paul Gaultier and Prada in the forthcoming sequel demonstrates the industry regards The Devil Wears Prada as a vehicle of genuine cultural prestige.

Even Vogue is getting in on the act by having its retiring editor Anna Wintour appearing on the May 2026 cover with her Priestly/Streep doppelganger.

An online life of its own

The Devil Wears Prada has benefited enormously from the explosion of social media.

Scenes have developed independent lives entirely detached from the film itself: Andy’s makeover montage; the devastating “that’s all” retort; Miranda’s icy side-eye; the coat on the desk.

These moments are endlessly played, memed, and reimagined.

The film’s quotability is inseparable from its longevity.

The Devil Wears Prada was more than a chick flick. Not quite a dramedy, not quite a workplace comedy, nor a satire, romance, coming-of-age story or comedy of manners — it draws confidently on the conventions of all of these.

This deliberate blurring of genres encourages repeated viewings.

The film is light enough for casual viewing, yet rich enough for serious analysis of its feminist credentials. Some argue it presents an essentially conservative message, warning women against unchecked ambition and reinforcing the idea that they must prioritise their personal lives and moral purity over professional power. Others contend the film links female empowerment with consumerism and individual choice, framing this as a form of agency for women.

This ambiguity in the film’s ideological positioning has contributed to its continued popularity.

When Miranda asks, “Is it impossible to find a lovely, slender, female paratrooper? Am I reaching for the stars here? Not really!” is she a model of a woman holding her own in a male-dominated industry, or is she complicit in perpetuating the very beauty standards that oppress women?

The film refuses to decide.

You watch The Devil Wears Prada very differently depending on your mood, age or job. The ability to mean different things at different moments in a viewer’s life is the structural foundation of any truly enduring film.

The film doesn’t feel dated in its look, or its content. Its humour remains biting. Its timeless feel is rare allowing each new generation to discover it as though it were made for them.

William Simon, Casual Lecturer, Education and English Departments, University of Tasmania

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

As Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island.

We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about that particular time. Odysseus might have replied, “It was nothing. In fact, it was less than nothing. Negative five years I dwelt with Calypso. How else could I have arrived home after only ten years? If you don’t believe me, ask her.”

Quantum particles, it turns out, are just as wily as Odysseus, as we have shown in an experiment published in Physical Review Letters. Not only can their arrival time suggest that they dwelt with other particles for a negative amount of time, but if one asks those other particles, they will corroborate the story.

Photons dwelling with atoms

Our experiment used photons – quantum particles of light – and the against-the-odds journey they must undertake to pass straight through a cloud of rubidium atoms.

These atoms have a “resonance” with the photons, meaning the energy of the photon can be transferred temporarily to the atoms as an atomic excitation. This allows the photon to “dwell” in the atomic cloud for a time before being released.

For this resonance to be effective, the photon must have a well-defined energy, matching the amount of energy required to put a rubidium atom into an excited state.

But, by a form of Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, if the energy of the photon is well defined then its timing must be uncertain: the pulse of light the photon occupies must have a long duration. This means we can’t know exactly when the photon enters the cloud, but we can know on average when it enters.

If a photon like this is fired into the cloud, the most likely outcome is that its energy will be transferred to the atoms, and then re-emitted as a photon travelling in a random direction. In such cases, the photon is scattered, and fails to arrive at its Ithaca.

Photon arrival times

But if the photon does make it straight through, a strange thing happens. Based on the average time when the photon enters the cloud, one can calculate the expected average time it would arrive at the far side of the cloud, assuming it travels at the speed of light (as photons usually do).

What one finds is that the photon actually arrives far earlier than that. In fact, it arrives so early it appears to have spent a negative amount of time inside the cloud – to exit, on average, before it enters.

This effect has been known for decades and was observed in a 1993 experiment. But physicists had mostly decided not to take this negative time seriously.

That’s because it can be explained by saying that only the very front of the long-duration pulse makes it straight through the atomic cloud, while the rest is scattered. This leads to a successful (non-scattered) photon arriving earlier than would be naively expected.

Asking the atoms

However, Aephraim Steinberg, one of the authors of that 1993 paper, was not so quick to accept this dismissal of the negative time as an artefact. In his laboratory at the University of Toronto, he wanted to find out what happened if one queried the rubidium atoms in the cloud to find out how long the photon had spent dwelling among them as an excitation. After an initial experiment with inconclusive results, he asked me, as a quantum theorist, for help in working out what to expect.

When we talk of querying the atoms, what this means in practice is continuously making a measurement on the atoms while the photon is passing through the cloud, to probe whether the photon’s energy is currently dwelling there. But there is a subtlety here: measurements in quantum physics inevitably disturb the system being measured.

If we were to make a precise measurement of whether the photon is dwelling in the atoms, at each instant of time, we would prevent the atoms from interacting with the photon. It is as if, merely by watching Calypso closely, we would stop her getting her hands on Odysseus (or vice versa). This is the well known quantum Zeno effect, which would destroy the very phenomenon we want to study.

Our experiment

The solution is to make, instead, a very imprecise (but still very accurately calibrated) measurement. That is the price paid to keep the disturbance negligible. Specifically, we fired a weak laser beam – unrelated to the single photon pulse – through the cloud of atoms, and measured small changes in the phase of the beam’s light to probe whether the atoms were excited.

Any single run of the experiment gives only a very rough indication of whether the photon dwelt in the atoms, but averaging millions of runs yields an accurate dwell time.

Amazingly, the result of this weak measurement of dwell time, when the photon goes straight through the cloud, exactly equals the negative time suggested by the photons’ average arrival time. Prior to our work, no-one suspected that these two times, measured in entirely different ways, would be equal.

Crucially, the negative value of the weakly measured dwell time cannot be explained by imagining that only the front of the photon’s pulse gets through, unlike the time inferred from the arrival time.

So what does this all mean? Is a time machine just around the corner?

Sadly, no. Our experiment is fully explained by standard physics.

But it does show that negative dwell time is not an artefact. However paradoxical it may seem, it has a directly measurable effect on the atomic cloud that the photon traverses. And it reminds us that there are still lands to discover on the odyssey that is quantum research.

Howard Wiseman, Director, Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University

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

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

Is the science that we do today truth, likely to be a lie, or is it undetermined? – Nathaniel K., age 15, Hamilton, Ohio

For most students, science is something you study and something you have to learn. I remember when I was in school, adults were always asking me things like “Do you like math?” and “Do you like science?” It’s almost like asking someone if they like spinach or broccoli.

In reality, science is not really a specific thing to like or hate, or something to believe in or not. Science is an activity. As one famous scientist put it, “Science is what scientists do.” It’s a way of working, a way to get things done.

So, then, what is it that scientists do? As a historian of science and medicine, I’ve studied how scientists try to understand the rules that govern things in the universe. For example, what makes the Moon orbit the Earth? How do clouds produce rain? How do people catch a cold? To answer questions like these, they do three things: They observe, they experiment and they analyze.

The process of science

All scientists carefully observe the subjects they are studying. Take the case of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin traveled the world collecting specimens of plants, animals and fossils to figure out how they came by their different features.

He soon came up with an idea: Maybe certain species in an area look the way they do because they have characteristics that are best adapted to the environment they live in, and they are passing these on to their offspring. Darwin kept testing out this idea everywhere he went, and in the end his theory seemed to work. Ever since, scientists have conducted countless studies that affirm his theory.

Many scientists take observation a step further by performing experiments. In an experiment, the scientist might use a laboratory and special instruments to modify something they’re studying and look at the effects of the change. Their aim is either to test a theory or to see whether certain changes occur regularly.

A good example of this process can be seen in the experiments conducted by Ivan Pavlov in the 1890s with dogs. By introducing a sound right before a dog would be fed, Pavlov found the dog would start reacting to the sound the very same way it reacted to a bowl of food. For Pavlov, this demonstrated that animals learned through a process of association, or “conditioning.”

Finally, scientists are constantly analyzing the results of their observations and experiments. Scientists use measurements, logic and math to consider what their findings mean. But it’s often not clear what the findings mean, and so the investigators end up having to make more observations, conduct more experiments and rethink their methods and guesses.

Reporting the findings

The analysis process doesn’t stop there. Scientists show the results of their work to others, who, in turn, are invited to weigh in on whether they did a good job answering their research question. The criticism can be pretty intense at times. In most cases, this practice includes telling other scientists who work in the same field about what they did and what they found by giving presentations at conferences.

Scientists also have to submit their work for more evaluation if they hope to get money to support their research. After that, they go through even more evaluation when they try to publish the findings of their research in professional magazines called journals.

In both cases, scientists undergo a process called peer review, during which other scientists who study similar topics are asked to basically grade the quality of the researcher’s work and provide both negative and positive feedback.

If reviewers decide the study is not good enough, the researcher won’t get funding or their study published.

Is science truth?

The work of a scientist isn’t just observing something out in the world. Scientists must invite other experts to weigh in on what is right and wrong about their methods and ideas. As a result, every scientist has to be ready to rethink what they have been doing and believing.

Through this process, scientists work at getting closer and closer to the truth. New observations and new experiments may support or disprove earlier ones, or they might open up a whole new set of questions to answer.

The scientific results of today aren’t the whole truth, but they are the closest we can come to it right now. And as scientists today and in the future keep working, they seek to bring the whole truth more and more into focus.

When you see science as something people do to reach the truth, you realize it’s a way of working, whose strength comes from scientists being open to changing their approaches and conclusions.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Greg Eghigian, Professor of History, Penn State

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

What’s the point of play? Is it simply a way to keep children occupied, or something more? For some, it’s about learning literacy and numeracy. For others, it’s how friendships form and relationships deepen. But it can be all of these at once, and more.

Most parents recognise that play matters. But there’s less agreement on what kind of play is best. Should children be guided towards activities designed to build specific skills, like sports for coordination, or construction for maths and engineering? Or should the child’s own interests lead the way, regardless of perceived educational value?

Our research focuses on a type of play often dismissed as “just for fun” – playing with dolls. Across a series of studies, we found that doll play can help children understand other people’s thoughts and feelings. This is a skill that underpins social interaction throughout life.

There is pressure on parents to create the “right” environment for development, often filled with toys that promise clear educational outcomes. STEM-focused toys (science, technology, engineering and maths), in particular, are widely seen as beneficial for learning. Doll play, on the other hand, can be viewed as having little educational benefit.

Our findings challenge that assumption.

More than make-believe

When playing with dolls, children often play out scenes between characters. These may seem simple on the surface but could present opportunities for the child to develop social and emotional skills.

As parents, it seems obvious that playmates are important for building and learning about relationships and other people, and recognising others’ emotions (empathy). But what if children can develop these skills even when playing alone?

Previous studies have found that children who engage more in pretend play tend to have stronger social understanding and empathy. Earlier studies, however, didn’t often use controlled methods to separate out the different factors linking pretend play and social understanding.

So, we set out to test this more directly. We worked with children aged four to eight, assessing their ability to understand that others can hold different beliefs and desires to their own. This is an important milestone in social development. If children recognise that their own mental states may vary from others, this should help them better understand other people and know how to interact with them.

After that initial assessment session, children were randomly assigned either a set of dolls or a tablet with open-ended creative games. They were asked to play several times a week, with parents logging how and when play occurred. We didn’t instruct children how to play because we wanted to understand their natural behaviour.

After approximately six weeks, both sets of children came back and again completed the task about understanding others’ mental states. We found that the children who had been assigned dolls to play with, rather than tablets, showed a greater improvement in their understanding of others’ mental states during the intervening period.

The findings suggest that doll play can actively support the development of social understanding. This is consistent with prior research of ours showing that areas of the brain linked to social processing are activated during doll play, and that children use more language about thoughts and feelings when playing with dolls than when using tablets.

Why it matters beyond childhood

For parents, the message is reassuring – playing with dolls lets children practice skills that they can also use when playing with playmates, like understanding others, anticipating behaviour and responding appropriately.

These abilities matter far beyond childhood. They help us collaborate, resolve conflicts and navigate relationships. In a world that often feels increasingly divided, the capacity to see things from another person’s perspective is not just useful – it’s essential.

Sarah Gerson, Lecturer in Developmental & Health Psychology, Cardiff University; Ross E Vanderwert, Lecturer in Neuroscience, Cardiff University, and Salim Hashmi, Lecturer in Psychology, King's College London

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

At the time of the dinosaurs, the oceans were teeming with life. Below the waves, giant marine reptiles, such as the fearsome 4m (13ft) long mosasaurs, were the undisputed apex predators.

In artistic reconstructions of these ancient oceans, cephalopods – the animal group that includes squid, cuttlefish, octopuses, and their ancestors – are almost always portrayed as prey, often seen desperately swimming away from the jaws of a marine reptile to avoid becoming lunch.

However, a remarkable new fossil suggests our view of the ancient oceans is incomplete, and that giant octopuses, perhaps reaching as long as 19m (62ft), may have been the ones doing the hunting.

The fossil in question is a giant octopus jaw, belonging to a new species called Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. It is found in Late Cretaceous rocks of Japan, making it between 100 million and 72 million years old.

Like other cephalopods, octopuses have a hard beak that looks like a parrot’s bill, used to bite and tear prey, and this fossil example is enormous – larger than that of the famous giant squid Architeuthis.

Based on the shape and size of the beak, Shin Ikegami, from Hokkaido University, Japan, and colleagues, identify it as belonging to the Cirrata, a group of finned octopuses still found today in the deepest oceans. They estimate that the animal may have reached between seven and 19 metres in length. Details have been published in the journal Science.

If that upper estimate is even close to correct, Nanaimoteuthis, would represent the largest invertebrate yet described from the fossil record — an animal rivalling the largest marine reptiles in scale.

The authors also use the wear and damage on the octopus beak as indicators of ancient behaviour. Scratches and pits on the surface point to an animal hunting and crushing prey with bones or shells, not scavenging or feeding on soft-bodied organisms.

Additionally, the wear pattern is asymmetric, interpreted by the authors as evidence of a preference for chewing on one side over the other, a trait associated with higher cognitive function.

Far from being food, Nanaimoteuthis may have been one of the most formidable predators in its ecosystem, in an era we have long assumed was defined by vertebrate dominance.

That such a claim can be made at all is remarkable, because cephalopods almost never leave any trace in the fossil record. Unlike fish, marine reptiles, or even ammonites, most cephalopods have no hard parts like bones.

Octopuses, in particular, are almost entirely “skin bags” filled with water. When they die, they rot quickly, and even the few hard parts, such as the beak, are seldom preserved.

This creates a systematic bias that skews our understanding of ancient ecosystems: animals that preserve well dominate our reconstructions, and the animals that don’t, even if they were common among certain ancient ecosystems, are largely invisible to us.

Every fossil cephalopod, therefore, represents a vital piece of palaeontological information, giving us a fleeting glimpse into a lost world of squishy invertebrates.

But not all cephalopodologists are convinced by the size estimate, with the potential length of 19m in particular drawing scrutiny on social media.

Scaling cephalopod body sizes from beaks is not straightforward. The relationship between jaw dimensions and total body size varies considerably across cephalopod species, a problem compounded by the patchy data available for rarely caught deep-water cirrate octopuses.

Other researchers have also questioned the behavioural inferences drawn from the wear patterns, arguing that bite asymmetry can be caused by many factors, and that drawing conclusions about animal intelligence from a single specimen is premature.

It is also important to put this finding into context of the living relatives of Nanaimoteuthis. Modern cirrate octopuses are not known to swim after prey, typically hunting small invertebrates on the seafloor, raising questions about whether their giant ancient cousins would ever have encountered, let alone challenged, the formidable marine reptiles.

But step back from the debate over metres and scaling equations, and something fundamental comes into view. Our reconstructions of ancient ecosystems are shaped by what preserves (bones, shells, teeth) and often systematically blind to what doesn’t.

While future investigations may test the size estimate or refine behavioural interpretations, this remarkable fossil shows that there may have been giants lurking in the vast, deep, and dark waters of the ancient oceans. We just couldn’t see them until now.

Thomas Clements, Lecturer, University of Reading

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

In the 1990s, Melissa Auf der Maur played bass in two of the decade’s most notable rock bands: Hole and Smashing Pumpkins.

Her new book, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir, documents this wild chapter in her life, as she navigates the heightened emotions and destructive excesses of Courtney Love and learns to wrangle the controlling influence of Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins).

Ten years earlier, Kim Gordon’s career began during New York’s post-punk era. Her book, Girl In A Band (2015), recently re-released as a tenth anniversary edition, chronicles her time with Sonic Youth, and charts her role within an alternative scene that shaped and influenced independent music culture across the United States.

By the early 1990s, she was something of a godmother figure for Auf der Maur’s generation of women.

Review: Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir – Melissa Auf Der Maur (Atlantic); Girl in a Band – Kim Gordon (Faber)

Introverted individuals with distinct perspectives on the peculiar challenges of the rock industry, Gordon and Auf der Maur appear to have benefited from a stability missing in many of their peers.

As bass players, they avoided the spotlight until embarking on their solo projects. And with backgrounds in the visual arts, they each had access to independent creative identities away from the stage, which no doubt minimised the pitfalls of rock stardom.

As a music journalist throughout the 1990s, I interviewed many of the people in their stories, including Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl, Thurston Moore and Kurt Cobain. I witnessed their complex politics and fierce power plays, some still ongoing.

Once or twice, I was personally impacted.

For example, a very high profile singer tried to persuade other women not to speak to me for my first book because my magazine profile of her was badly altered by a male editor. Another musician blamed me for publishing personal details in an interview after I’d given her full copy approval.

It was, as Auf der Maur says, a time of “messy humanity”, low-level trust, and delicate egos.

It was also, as she points out, the last analogue decade: a time before the music scene was transformed by the internet, when rock culture appeared to be finally embracing powerful women and female agency. But in my experience, and as each of these books reveals, it was never that straightforward.

Musical callings and romantic dreams

An artistic free spirit raised in Montreal by unorthodox, creative parents, Melissa Auf der Maur first saw Hole and Smashing Pumpkins within a fortnight of each other in July 1991. Both bands played at the legendary punk club, Les Foufounes Électriques, where she worked part-time while studying photography.

More impressed by Hole’s calm, centred bassist, Jill Emery, than the band’s infamous, volatile frontwoman, Auf der Maur was truly starstruck by Corgan. She introduced herself to him after he was bottled on stage by her roommate. Watching him play, she experienced a “new musical calling”. Four months later, she travelled to a Pumpkins show in Vermont and spent the night “soul fucking” him in his motel room.

“I am you and you are me,” she remembers Corgan saying to her, in what sounds like a rock-starry show of narcissism towards an impressionable fan. But for Auf der Maur, who occasionally veers into grandiose claims, the encounter was a “romantic dream come true” and “a turning point […] musically, personally and cosmically”.

More tellingly perhaps, though she describes Corgan as eventually exerting “more influence on my life than anyone other than my parents”, Auf der Maur didn’t question his patriarchal power dynamic for many years – despite being in one of rock’s most notorious female-fronted bands.

But Corgan’s hold extended to his former girlfriend, Courtney Love, long after she left him for Kurt Cobain. When Hole’s second bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died from an overdose, it was Corgan who decided Auf der Maur should be the replacement.

The Hole drama

Life in Hole was nothing if not dramatic – and Auf der Maur’s account harbours no illusions about the difficulty of working with a grieving, traumatised widow.

But her empathy and compassion keep her story from collapsing into the critical terrain so often provoked by the outspoken, uncontained Love who attracted considerable vitriol, particularly after becoming involved with Kurt Cobain.

Auf der Maur is also more forgiving than drummer Patty Schemel, who paints a harsher picture of the ambitious, tempestuous singer in her brilliant memoir, Hit So Hard. But she was very aware of her marginalised position as Love’s “good girl” in the autocratic Hole. She had no artistic freedom in the band and eventually grew frustrated with her unfulfilling situation.

After five years in Love’s orbit, Auf der Maur wanted out. By 1998, the singer’s Hollywood film career had catapulted her into a different stratosphere of celebrity culture, further widening the existing chasm between her and her band members.

And the glamour and excitement of big festival billings and hit records were not enough to prevent the bass player from feeling ultimately “disillusioned and disconnected”.

Her decision to quit was compounded when she fell in love with ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, now with the Foo Fighters. His long-running rift with Love had previously made him “off-limits”.

But before she was released from her restrictive contract with Hole, Corgan was back in touch, asking her to replace D’arcy Wretzky in Smashing Pumpkins for a year of intensive touring. Wretzky’s sudden departure is glossed over in the book as a “touchy subject”, though she played with the Pumpkins for 11 years, and was reputedly a friend of Auf der Maur.

I remember Wretzky as a quietly intelligent individual with a striking stage presence, but Corgan’s domineering personality and punishing work ethic apparently proved too much for her.

And Auf der Maur makes no secret of Corgan’s ruthlessness. At her first rehearsal, he issued her with three rules: “One, you can’t make a mistake. Two, you can’t get sick. And three, there are no days off.”

Away from Grohl, who was also on the road with his band, she was bound to a gruelling schedule at the hands of a man she now saw as a moody overachiever. In response, she began to change her perspective.

Corgan’s partner at the time was the gifted photographer Yelena Yemchuk, who, Auf der Maur notes, had become “a bit of a kept woman”. Knowing Grohl wanted marriage and children, she witnessed Yemchuk with “her beautiful talent trapped in the bell jar of Billy’s world” with growing alarm.

As the two women became close, together they realised they needed to “step out of the shadows of these bigger, more successful men” and forge their own paths.

With the culmination of the Pumpkins world tour in 2001, Auf der Maur was 29 and finally ready for a new direction. She left her relationship with Grohl and turned down Corgan’s invitation to collaborate on a new project. She finishes her book with a glimpse into her next chapter: motherhood, and a grounded life of artistic ventures in upstate New York.

It’s more of a beginning than an end.

Feminism and challenges with men

The first time I interviewed Kim Gordon was over the phone in 1990. At the time, she was the bass player with Sonic Youth, the seminal no wave band she co-founded with her husband, singer/guitarist Thurston Moore, in 1981. Hinting at what I suspected was sometimes a lonely situation, she told me that while the band’s relationship was essentially a beautiful one, her male colleagues could be “so non-communicative”.

Three years later, I had a second, longer conversation with Gordon in her New York apartment for my aforementioned book, during which she elaborated on her original theme. Being in a band with men could be challenging, she said, because “there are some really boring aspects to it” and “no matter how much of a new man someone thinks they are, they’re just not!”

Gordon’s experience is summed up by both the content and title of her acclaimed memoir. With a new foreword by her friend, celebrated American writer, Rachel Kushner, and an additional closing chapter where Gordon reflects on the intervening decade, the latest version of the book is testament to its ongoing relevance for feminism, popular culture and music history.

Infused with the visceral, embodied sensuality of her artistic perspective, Gordon’s memoir details her upbringing in Los Angeles with her schizophrenic brother, Keller, whose moods clouded her early life, and whose death in 2023, aged 74, she recounts in the new edition.

It charts her pivotal move to New York as a 27-year-old in 1980, her involvement with the city’s post punk arts and music scene, her relationship with Moore and their resulting career with Sonic Youth.

Crucially, it details her influence in the Riot Grrrl movement, and her side projects, Free Kitten, with best friend Julie Cafritz, and fashion label, X-Girl, with Daisy von Furth, all of which afforded her the female companionship she lacked in Sonic Youth.

‘Painfully protracted’ marriage breakdown

It also tells the more universal story of a painfully protracted marriage breakdown and a couple’s failed attempts to save their relationship, following Gordon’s discovery of Moore’s affair. The book refrains from specifying dates, but by the time she found out through texts and emails, her husband had been unfaithful for several years.

The woman in question, who is not named in the book, was Eva Prinz, who became Moore’s second wife in 2020. At the time of the affair, Prinz was married to her second husband. She had previously been involved with one of Sonic Youth’s collaborators.

An editor for an independent publisher, she had initially approached Gordon about a potential book project in the early 2000s, but Gordon had passed it onto Moore, with fateful consequences.

Sickened by Moore’s long-concealed infidelity with someone well known to their inner circle, Gordon was left to navigate the devastating impact on her family, her career and her sense of self. Given the pivotal nature of this episode, it seems fitting that she starts her story here, at the end of a significant personal and professional era, with Sonic Youth’s final performance in 2011.

According to Gordon, this last appearance in Sao Paulo, Brazil “was all about the boys”. Struggling to hide her misery, anxiety and anger on stage, while her ex regressed into an adolescent display of “rock star showboating”, she was tempted to verbalise her fury on stage. But she didn’t want to follow the unboundaried example of Courtney Love, who was then ranting and raving her way around South America on tour with Hole.

“I would never want to be seen as the car crash she is,” writes Gordon. “I didn’t want our last concert to be distasteful when Sonic Youth meant so much to so many people; I didn’t want to use the stage for any kind of personal statement, and what good would it have done anyway?”

Distance as power

Gordon is highly adept at balancing between strong emotion and careful restraint. Throughout her book, she considers herself honestly, but thoughtfully. She conveys a quiet self-possession and enigmatic presence, writing as she speaks: with intelligence and a guarded openness. It’s how I remember her: warm enough to gift me a pair of John Fluevog sandals straight from her own closet, yet somehow always slightly removed. As Kushner says in her introduction to the memoir, “distance is the power of her performance”.

Now 72, Kim Gordon has been a touring musician for almost 40 years. Having made multiple forays into the worlds of fashion, art and film, since Sonic Youth she has launched two experimental bands with male collaborators, Body/Head and Glitterbust, been nominated for two Grammy awards, and released three highly acclaimed solo albums as a formidable frontwoman with an all-girl band.

These days, Gordon performs as if her life depends on it. With her second chapter well underway, she’s on fire – and cooler than ever. Let’s hope a second memoir is in the works.

Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania

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

Most people know about “good” and “bad” cholesterol. But few realise there is another type called lipoprotein(a). It can raise the risk of heart attacks and strokes, even in people who do everything right.

This lesser-known cholesterol particle, often written as Lp(a), is gaining increasing attention from researchers and drug companies.

Lp(a) isn’t included in routine cholesterol tests and there’s currently little we can do about it. That may now be changing.

What is lipoprotein(a)?

Lipoprotein(a) is a cholesterol that carries lipoprotein – particles made of fats and proteins – in your blood. It’s structurally similar to LDL (low-density lipoprotein, or “bad” cholesterol), but with an additional protein attached called apolipoprotein(a).

This extra protein component seems to make Lp(a) more likely to contribute to the build-up of fatty deposits in arteries. It may also promote blood clotting. Together, these processes increase the likelihood of cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke).

Large-scale studies and international guidelines now recognise Lp(a) as a risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

What determines your Lp(a) levels?

Unlike most other cholesterol measures, Lp(a) is largely determined by genetics.

Around 70-90% of variation in Lp(a) levels is inherited. This is driven mainly by differences in the LPA gene, which controls the structure of apolipoprotein(a).

Because of this strong genetic control, Lp(a) levels are usually set early in life and remain relatively stable over time, with little influence from diet, exercise or body weight.

There are some smaller influences. Levels can vary by sex, ethnicity and hormonal changes, and may be slightly affected by factors such as menopause or kidney disease.

How does it affect your risk?

A growing body of research shows higher Lp(a) levels are associated with an increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and aortic valve disease.

Importantly, the relationship appears continuous. In long-term studies, cardiovascular risk rises step by step as Lp(a) levels increase.

Lp(a) also adds to overall risk. For example, someone with high LDL cholesterol and high Lp(a) is likely to be at higher risk than someone with elevated LDL cholesterol alone.

For people with higher Lp(a) levels, cardiovascular risk rises mainly when inflammation is elevated.

This helps explain why some people develop cardiovascular disease despite otherwise favourable risk profiles.

Can you lower lipoprotein(a)?

There are currently few options to lower Lp(a).

Lifestyle changes that improve heart health, such as eating well, being physically active and not smoking, remain essential. But they have minimal effect on Lp(a) itself.

Most commonly used cholesterol-lowering medications, including statins, do not reduce Lp(a). In some cases, statins may even increase Lp(a) slightly. Despite this, statins still reduce overall cardiovascular risk and remain a cornerstone of treatment.

Some newer drugs, such as PCSK9 inhibitors, can lower Lp(a), but typically only by a modest amount of around 15–30%.

Several drug companies, including Novartis, Amgen and Eli Lilly, are racing to develop treatments that specifically lower Lp(a). These new medicines work very differently from statins. Instead of helping the body clear cholesterol from the blood, they use a “gene silencing” approach that reduces how much Lp(a) the liver makes in the first place.

This means it switches off production of cholesterol rather than trying to remove what is already there.

In early clinical trials, these drugs have lowered Lp(a) levels by 80–90%, far more than existing treatments. This is why Lp(a) is suddenly getting attention.

If upcoming trials show these large reductions also lead to fewer heart attacks and strokes, it could change how cardiovascular risk is assessed and treated, especially for people whose risk is driven largely by genetics rather than lifestyle.

Should you get tested?

Lp(a) is not included in standard cholesterol tests. A specific blood test is required.

Medicare doesn’t cover these blood tests, so if your doctor orders one you’ll have to pay out of pocket – around A$25 to $80 – plus any costs associated with the consultation.

International guidelines now recommend measuring Lp(a) at least once in adulthood, particularly for people with a family history of early heart disease or unexplained cardiovascular risk.

Because levels are largely genetically determined and stable, a single measurement is often considered sufficient for most people.

What should you focus on?

Learning you have high Lp(a) can feel frustrating, especially given the limited options to lower it directly.

But it’s important to see Lp(a) as one part of your overall cardiovascular risk.

There are still many factors you can influence to lower your overall risk, and particularly your LDL cholesterol. These include:

• LDL (bad) cholesterol
• blood pressure
• smoking
• physical activity
• diet quality
• managing conditions such as diabetes

For people with elevated Lp(a), managing these factors may be even more important.

What happens next?

Research into Lp(a) is moving quickly. If current clinical trials show targeted therapies reduce cardiovascular events, testing and treatment may become more common.

For now, awareness is an important first step.

If you are concerned about your cardiovascular risk, it may be worth discussing Lp(a) testing with your doctor, especially if you have a strong family history of heart disease.

At the same time, the broader message to maximise heart health through healthy behaviours remains unchanged. Even as new risk factors emerge, the foundations of good heart health are still the things we can control.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Kirsten Adlard, Honorary Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

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

Loneliness is something most of us will experience at some point. It is a normal emotion, not a character flaw. But it is also something that can quietly affect how we think and remember, and researchers have long debated whether it might even raise the risk of dementia.

A new study, published in Aging and Mental Health, suggests the picture is more complicated than either side of that debate has allowed for.

First, it is worth being clear about what dementia actually is. It is not a single diagnosis but an umbrella term covering a range of conditions – the most familiar being Alzheimer’s disease – that cause memory loss, confusion, difficulties with language and a gradual loss of independence.

Cognitive decline, meaning a general slowing or weakening of mental function, is not the same thing. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they should not be: you can experience cognitive decline without ever developing dementia.

We do not fully understand what causes Alzheimer’s. We know that a healthy lifestyle lowers the risk, but it is no guarantee. Plenty of people who have done everything right still develop it. The disease is shaped by genetics, ageing and biological factors we are still working to understand.

The new study followed just over 10,000 adults aged between 65 and 94 over six years. All were in good health at the outset, fully independent and free of dementia. Researchers tracked their memory over that period and asked whether loneliness played a role in how it changed.

The answer was nuanced. Loneliness did appear to contribute to memory difficulties – but there was no evidence that it led to dementia itself. That is an important distinction. Memory problems and dementia are not the same thing, and conflating them causes unnecessary alarm. This distinction is crucial, and while the researchers did not conflate the two, this nuance is often lost in interpretation.

Not the whole story

It is also worth noting that loneliness rarely travels alone. Many participants in the study also had diabetes, high blood pressure, depression or low levels of physical activity – all of which affect the brain independently. Diabetes, for instance, can interfere with how the brain processes glucose, the fuel it runs on, which in turn affects memory. Depression has a similar effect. Unpicking loneliness from these other factors is genuinely difficult, and the study does not fully resolve that problem.

One finding that stood out was the high rate of loneliness reported in southern Europe – a region often assumed to have strong social networks. It is a reminder that loneliness is subjective. Feeling lonely is not simply about how many people surround you – it is about how connected you feel to them.

There is also a methodological limitation worth noting. The study treated loneliness as a fixed state, when in reality it shifts – sometimes day to day – across the whole of a life. A single snapshot cannot capture that.

The broader research on loneliness and cognitive decline remains genuinely mixed, and this study does not settle it. What it does suggest, usefully, is that health services might benefit from screening for loneliness alongside routine cognitive testing: treating social connection as part of preventative medicine rather than a soft concern left to one side.

And there is reason for optimism. The brain is resilient. Research suggests that memory difficulties linked to loneliness can improve once that loneliness lifts and that staying socially active may boost cognitive performance more broadly. Loneliness, on its own, is unlikely to be the deciding factor in whether someone develops dementia.

Ivana Babicova, Senior Lecturer, Psychology, Birmingham City University

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

The consumer watchdog’s Federal Court case against Woolworths over its “prices dropped” promotions is underway and will run into next week.

This – and a separate court action against Coles – are crucial legal cases, with the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.

Around two-thirds of all Australian supermarket sales are made at Woolworths or Coles. So most Australians are likely to have seen some of the disputed “discounts” being fought over in these cases.

Together, these cases will decide the line between unlawful trickery versus legitimate marketing tactics in how every retailer sells products to Australians.

‘Illusory’ or real discounts?

If you followed the Coles “down down” discounts trial in February, the underlying complaint in the current Woolworths case will feel familiar.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleges both supermarket giants misled shoppers over discounts on hundreds of items.

Interestingly, day one of the Woolworths case on Monday suggests the ACCC intends to run this court case a little differently. Instead of spending time on what the supermarket’s strategy was, as in the Coles case, the ACCC cut straight to its core argument about misleading consumers.

The current Woolworths case is focused on a bundle of 12 everyday products, selected from a longer list of 266 raised by the ACCC. Those products include Tim Tams and Tiny Teddy biscuits, Fab laundry powder and Kleenex Aloe Vera tissues.

The ACCC argues that after these products had been at a stable price for at least 180 days or more (excluding short fluctuations), Woolworths temporarily raised the price for 45 days (or less) by at least 15%.

Then it dropped the price below the recently raised price and labelled it as “prices dropped” – even though that cost was more, or at least as much, as the previous long-running price.

The ACCC calls those marketed discounts “illusory”.

Woolworths denies this, arguing its “prices dropped” labels were literally true: the price of a pack of Oreos biscuits really was $5 the month before, before it was “dropped” to $4.50.

The ACCC has pointed out those Oreos cost $3.50 before the price rise.

In court on Monday, Woolworths’ barrister Robert Yezerski SC focused on the supermarket’s defence that rising costs had forced up prices – and Australian shoppers recognised that: “They know what is happening in the economy, and they are indeed expecting prices to rise.”

So the Federal Court will have to decide whether an average supermarket shopper thought Woolworths’ “prices dropped” discount ticket meant dropped from a long-term price, or dropped from an always fluctuating price.

What if the supermarkets win?

Closing its court case in February, Coles said the ACCC hadn’t provided any evidence to prove “ordinary reasonable consumers” had understood its “down down” discounts meant the new price was lower than a past “regular” price (as opposed to the most recent past price).

If the Federal Court accepts the supermarkets’ arguments that consumers expected prices to change because of inflation, and that their discount tickets were strictly true, it would be significant.

It would send a message that while marketing has to be factually correct, consumers should understand that prices always fluctuate, so promoted discounts are just a point-in-time price.

In other words, shoppers would need to keep a closer eye on prices day to day.

Huge fines if the ACCC wins

An ACCC win would mean every major Australian retailer – not just supermarkets – needed to review their discount strategies.

It would mean Australian Consumer Law applied more strictly in future, ensuring the whole impression presented by a discount ticket was accurate.

The loss would also be backed up by considerable penalties, possibly reaching hundreds of millions of dollars for each supermarket.

The supermarkets’ alleged contraventions took place in 2021–22. During that time, penalties under Australian Consumer Law rose from a maximum of A$10 million per contravention, to the greater of $50 million, three times the benefit obtained, or 30% of adjusted turnover during the breach period per contravention – for every product and every promotion.

The ACCC has made clear it is seeking a “significant penalty” if it wins, plus community service orders funding meal-delivery charities.

Whichever way this judgment lands, two class actions representing consumers are already waiting in the wings.

Setting rules for truth in advertising

A decade ago, the ACCC took on both supermarkets over allegations of unconscionable treatment of suppliers. Coles settled its case and paid a penalty of $10 million. But Woolworths went to court and won; its conduct was deemed “not unconscionable”.

Despite those different outcomes, the court cases did have an impact. They led to the introduction of a binding Food and Grocery Code of Conduct, which came into effect in 2025. It aims to promote good faith bargaining by supermarkets and protect suppliers if they insist on their legal rights.

There is no date yet for when we’ll have the judgments on the Woolworths and Coles cases, both being heard by Justice Michael O'Bryan.

His judgments will effectively set the rules for what “truth in advertising” means for every retailer in the country in the future.

Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne

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

Most of our food travels many thousands of kilometres across Australia to reach our kitchens. We are highly dependent on a vast web of long-haul trucks to move food between growers, massive food distribution hubs and large supermarkets.

Of course, trucks need fuel – and lots of it. As war in the Middle East leads to diesel price spikes in Australia, food prices will rise too. Already, the National Farmers’ Federation has said it expects food prices will rise “within weeks”.

And as the COVID pandemic showed – where supermarket shelves were emptied after widespread panic buying – it’s not just war that can reveal weaknesses in a system too heavily reliant on available diesel and long supply chains. These problems are also laid bare when natural disasters strike, roads are cut off and trucks can’t get food to supermarkets.

Meanwhile, Australia’s current strategy of releasing fuel reserves may only end up delaying food price hikes, as the war in the Middle East plays out in unknown ways.

This shock to our food system is not the first, and it won’t be the last.

Focusing on band-aid solutions that prop up the current system undermines our long-term capacities for resilience. We need a plan B for when plan A – the current system – isn’t working.

We need a place-based approach

A place-based approach to food systems asks the question: what could work for our own local (or regional) area?

This approach normalises access to locally or regionally grown food, and acknowledges that what works in one area might not work in another.

Access to shorter food supply chains can include things such as policies to promote:

• smaller, regional produce processing and distribution hubs
• local abattoirs
• local canneries
• cultivation and protection of regional food bowls, rather than building housing on them
• direct food sales from cooperatives
• promoting school and home gardens.

Allowing people to participate in the system – or even co-produce food – helps build community resilience to economic shocks and access food beyond just supermarket shelves.

This could include things such as:

• joining a community-supported agriculture group, in which a community of people pledge money to buy produce from a farm before it’s harvested and offers certainty to local farmers
• buying what you can from farmer’s cooperatives and markets
• participating in a community food garden
• buying locally grown produce online, which has become easier in the wake of the pandemic
• participating in fruit and veggie box collectives.

A place-based approach also means focusing on what’s in season in your region and acknowledging that this means you might not, for instance, be able to get mangoes in autumn in southern Victoria.

Having a back-up plan

Governments need to encourage people to have a contingency for tough times, when the long supply chain supermarket system is disrupted.

For communities, this can mean asking yourself what’s your plan if you can’t get food from the supermarket. It might mean taking time to work out where the local suppliers are, what food is in season in your area, and how you can support local farming co-operatives.

Being able to access food reliably from local and regional places is common sense; it means we don’t have all our eggs in one basket.

For businesses, a more strategic approach to local procurement – by preferencing the purchase of locally produced food – means your business can stay open when the food supply chain system is under pressure.

Governments need a plan to shorten food supply chains

Shorter food supply chains means ensuring people can get food within, for example, a 400-kilometre radius. Federal, state and local governments have a role to play in finding policies to support this. This can include promoting and supporting things such as:

• farm gate sales and shops
• pick-your-own produce on farm sites
• community, school and home gardens, and
• purchasing groups.

One example, which I was involved in, was a local farm co-run by students with the Mini Farm Project, on school grounds at Loganlea State High School in Queensland. The students farmed food, donated food to local charities, and learned about self-sufficiency.

Governments obviously have a range of competing priorities. But smart policy-making means embedding access to place-based food initiatives across multiple policy areas, such as climate change, education, urban development and community-building projects.

A system that can withstand shocks

Sudden shocks – such as war, pandemics and severe weather events – reveal the folly of having a food supply chain so absolutely reliant on the price of crude oil.

A major part of our vulnerability to these shocks is our unquestioned and ongoing dependence on government to come in and prop up the system.

The federal government recently announced it would undertake national assessment of Australia’s food supply chains, which will “focus on diesel supply chains, and will then expand to other critical agricultural inputs, including crop protection products and fertilisers”.

This is a start but it fails to solve the problems sustainably.

Place-based approaches to food systems offers opportunities to change the dynamics around how we relate to our food.

Kimberley Reis, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering and Built Environment, Griffith University, Griffith University

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