The high-stakes nature of Year 12 exams can bring out sudden anxiety in the best of students.

You might have felt this before or during an assessment. Sometimes it feels like a rising panic in your chest. Other times it’s like your mind has gone blank and you can’t remember anything. These feelings can make it difficult to focus.

The key to good exam performance is learning to manage your anxiety.

We are clinical psychologists who research academic stress. Here’s what can help.

Academic stress is common

Research shows one in six students experience extreme levels of stress during the final years of schooling. This involves unrelenting stress that disturbs sleep and wellbeing. While moderate stress is okay, too much stress can negatively impact academic performance.

In its simplest form, exam anxiety is a stress response like any other. It’s the activation of the body’s flight-or-fight response, which is triggered by the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system takes care of things like your blood pressure, heart rate and digestion – the things you don’t think about.

The flight-or-fight response occurs when our brain perceives we are in danger, whether it is physical danger, such as fear of being bitten by an angry dog, or psychological, such as stuffing up a speech.

What anxiety in an exam can feel like

The flight-or-fight response might lead to physical symptoms such as:

• an increased heart rate

• an increased rate of breathing

• sweating

• a feeling of unease in the stomach

• tightness in the chest.

While these symptoms might seem handy if you need to flee or fight, it’s hard to see how they are helpful in an exam situation. Who needs dizziness and sweaty palms when trying to solve a quadratic formula?

Your brain can catastrophise the situation

As you head into the exam you might also face thoughts such as:

I’m going to fail. I won’t be able to remember anything. My mind will go blank.

But this sort of thinking increases the perceived danger of the situation.

Research shows thinking less catastrophically, and more realistically, about a situation can help reduce anxiety.

1. Challenge negative thoughts

To challenge these negative thoughts before or during an exam, it helps to ask yourself questions such as:

• Is it realistic that I will completely fail the exam?

• Is it realistic that I won’t remember anything?

• Do I actually need to get a perfect score to get through this?

• What would a friend say to reassure me right now?

2. Focus on your breathing

Another practical way to help reduce anxiety is by slowing down your breathing rate.

In an exam scenario, a full meditation session might be out of the question. But there are still exercises you can do.

For example, while you wait for the exam to begin, or during reading time, try to take a long breath in while counting to four in your mind. Then breathe out over a count of four. Repeat this while slowing down your counting. After a few rounds you will hopefully notice your anxiety start to lessen.

3. Make an exam plan

Look through the exam during reading time and find the questions you feel most comfortable with. Once reading time is over, aim to tackle these questions first. This can help build your confidence during an exam.

If you have long answer or essay questions, it can help to read over all the questions before writing so that while you are answering the “easier” question, your brain will be working in the background, bringing forward information you can use when you answer the harder questions.

This works because information is stored in our brain using networks, so reading questions repeatedly can activate the links between concepts in those networks. This means information might be more readily available when you come back to the harder question.

Stress isn’t always a bad thing

If you’re still feeling stressed, the good news is that mild to moderate levels of stress have actually been shown to improve academic performance. This is because the flight-or-fight response also increases mental alertness and motivation.

After the exam is over, you might feel relieved or devastated, or something in between. It is normal to ruminate over the questions and how you responded to them.

One way to bring yourself back down to a calmer state is to do some exercise. Take a walk or go for a run. This burns up the stress hormone, cortisol, and can help you recover more quickly.

If this article has raised issues for you or your child, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.

Viviana Wuthrich, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Macquarie University and Jessica Belcher, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University

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

David Hockney is no stranger to Australia. In 2016, the National Gallery of Victoria staged a major exhibition of the British artist’s later works. In 1999, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) acquired one of Hockney’s most ambitious works, A Bigger Grand Canyon. Earlier this year, the NGA showcased its significant holdings of his work in the exhibition David Hockney: Portraits in Print.

Now the “immersive experience” David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away) has found its way to Sydney’s Carriageworks.

Created by Hockney in collaboration with London production house and venue Lightroom, where it debuted in 2023, Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away) is a four-screen documentary that traverses Hockney’s oeuvre, career and philosophy over roughly 50 minutes, featuring massive whole-of-room digital projections, a soundtrack of original music by American composer Nico Muhly and narration by the artist himself.

The relatively recent death of Hockney, in June, gives this event a melancholy new context, though the work itself is far from melancholy in mood or tone.

Indeed, it invites visitors to “Love Life”, a saccharine slogan also deployed in the show’s merchandise.

Portrait of a prolific artist

Hockney in 50 minutes is a tall order. Across seven decades he was prolific and restless; at various points a draftsman, painter, stage designer, printer, poster-maker, photographer, writer and multimedia artist.

He was a big and contradictory character, too. Till the end, he was simultaneously flat cap and bigger splash: the proud working class Yorkshireman and the sophisticated Los Angeles transplant, pop artist and globetrotting dandy.

The diversity and experimentation at the heart of Hockney’s work are captured in both the form and the content of Bigger and Closer. Inside the show’s large rectangular space, enormous projected artworks and imagery unfurl and repeat across the space.

We are reminded of Hockney’s versatility and creativity across genres at every turn. One particularly effective section features Hockney’s brilliant and witty stage designs for productions of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Puccini’s Turandot.

Celebratory rather than probing

Other sections are less convincing.

Hockney delivers what feels like a wilfully un-fact-checked TED Talk on the use of perspective in the history of painting. It recalls his fascinating but irritating book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters, which made extravagant, disputed claims about the role of the camera obscura in the work of various painters.

This whole section contributes little to our understanding of Hockney or perspective.

Across the narration we hear Hockney’s voice from different periods of his life, and his tone and timbre are familiar and engaging. But what he says is sometimes grating. We are treated to bland remarks (“By putting more in you get more reality”) and dubious assertions (he claims “nobody had painted LA” before he did).

Even when Hockney is on firmer ground, inviting us to look closely at nature, he presents this as a new idea – as if other great artists, photographers and designers hadn’t also urged us to do exactly this over the long tradition of art-making.

Frustratingly, we get no sense of Hockney’s engagement with the fraught politics of his times. Was he an advocate for the gay community that he painted and to which he belonged, in its struggles for equality and against oppression through the ‘60s and '70s? How did his art chronicle the AIDS crisis that affected his personal circle so profoundly? How did the social and demographic changes and struggles of his adopted city impact his work?

The answers to these complex questions might take more time and critical distance to unravel and aren’t to be found in Bigger and Closer, which is celebratory in its approach.

Hockney sometimes comes off as a “one-percenter” of the art world. The documentary shows him driving an open top car to the strains of Wagner, embarking on tours of Europe, editing Paris Vogue and hanging out at the opera.

Spectacle without intimacy

I was certainly moved at points by the sheer ambition and beauty of Hockney’s work, and this is a sophisticated and attractive technical spectacle, with its multi-screen design, digital effects and lively colour palette.

But Bigger and Closer left me unsatisfied. I wanted other voices and critical views. Most of all, I yearned to encounter an artist, a body of work and a world in all their materiality and complexity.

This digital spectacle is no substitute for contemplating Hockney’s sketchbooks, or encountering '70s paintings such as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, with their unique combination of stillness and charge, renaissance allusion and hip modernity.

It only hints at the humour and humanity of his collaged photographic portraits or the playfulness of his portrait series.

For those not familiar with Hockney, this is an inventive gateway to his oeuvre. But while the artist is certainly bigger, we emerge no closer to truly understanding his life, his work or its place in culture.

David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away) is at Carriageworks, Sydney, until January 24.

Mark Ledbury, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, University of Sydney

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

When students choose their Year 11 and 12 subjects, they are deciding more than their pathway to university. They are choosing the kinds of learning and experiences available to them.

Yet senior Australian students are increasingly turning away from creative arts subjects.

Why might this be happening? And what are young people losing if these opportunities disappear?

What are the figures?

An analysis of national figures shows between 2015 and 2023, Year 12 enrolments fell by 39% in drama, 38% in dance, 16% in music and 14% in visual arts.

We also know there are different patterns across different states and school systems.

For example, earlier this month, The Sydney Morning Herald reported NSW public school enrolments in drama fell from 2,403 in 2016 to 1,441 last year (a drop of about 40%).

Across private and Catholic schools, enrolments dipped from 2,321 to 1,751 (a drop of about 25%) over the same period.

Why are students turning away?

There is no single explanation, but curriculum priorities and university entrance pressures provide some clues.

Education policy has increasingly emphasised science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), sometimes positioning these disciplines as more “valuable” when it comes to employment than the arts.

A 2024 NSW parliamentary inquiry identified the prioritisation of STEM subjects, job-readiness and perceptions of future earnings as factors contributing to the devaluing of creative arts education.

Students’ ATAR concerns compound the problem. The NSW inquiry also heard some students and parents believe that drama or music will not scale well and disadvantage university entrance:

students are dissuaded or discouraged from pursuing their passions […] for fear of being scaled poorly and the pressures around achieving a high ATAR.

The committee recommended a “myth busting” campaign targeted at students, parents and schools to provide accurate information about how creative arts subjects are scaled.

There have also been curriculum changes to drama and music, which teachers have argued limit student choice and creativity.

These can all have a compounding effect. Falling enrolments mean smaller classes, which lead to subject closures and fewer choices for the next group of students coming through.

What are students losing?

An analysis of national figures shows between 2012 and 2022, the proportion of male Year 12 students taking an arts subject fell from 22.2% to 15.8%. For female students, it fell from 37.6% to 26.9%.

These represent broadly comparable proportional declines of around 29% each. So this is not simply a story about boys abandoning the arts. But the gender dimension should not be ignored here.

Subjects such as drama offers opportunities to explore emotion, vulnerability and perspectives different from one’s own. Through characterisation, collaborative performance and negotiating creative differences, students can practise empathy, emotional communication and shared responsibility. These experiences can help challenge toxic masculinity and restrictive expectations that frame vulnerability as weakness.

Research on senior secondary drama classrooms shows students can negotiate gender expectations through dramatic characters and classroom practice.

Drama cannot dismantle these attitudes by itself, but it creates valuable spaces in which they can be explored and challenged.

These are demanding subjects

Drama, music and visual arts are also academically demanding disciplines. They require interpretation, analysis, experimentation, critical judgement and sustained practice. They also require performance under pressure.

These are not alternatives to academic learning – they are forms of academic learning. A systematic review of educational drama research, for example, found it can have potential benefits for students’ critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration.

These skills particularly matter in an age of artificial intelligence, where students need to learn how to question and evaluate information and exercise creative judgement. In the arts, the process of making and revising is itself an important part of learning.

What needs to change?

Reversing this decline requires more than encouraging individual students to choose creative subjects. Governments and education authorities must reconsider curriculum and funding priorities, challenge misconceptions about ATAR scaling, support specialist teachers and facilities, and strengthen arts education in teacher preparation.

The question is not whether every student should study drama, music or visual arts. It is whether young people should lose access to these important forms of learning because our education system signals that other forms of knowledge matters more.

David Roy, Lecturer in Education, University of Newcastle

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

Exercise, avoiding alcohol or even getting enough sleep aren’t the factors most connected to college students’ well-being.

Spending face-to-face time with friends and other people is the strongest predictor of their mental health, according to a 2026 study of nearly 80,000 students that I conducted with the help of my students.

This finding matters because young people are spending less time together in person and more time communicating through screens.

Between 2010 and 2022, the percentage of U.S. high school seniors who reported seeing friends face-to-face almost every day declined from 44% to 32%.

Against this backdrop, mental health challenges among young people have become an increasing public health concern.

Suicide remains the second-leading cause of death among Americans ages 15 to 34.

But mental health is about more than the absence of mental illness. My student researchers and I wanted to ask a somewhat different question: What helps young people flourish?

To answer that question, we created a broad measure of well-being that captured more than the lack of mental health problems, such as psychological distress. It also included positive aspects of life, such as having supportive relationships, hobbies and a sense of meaning and purpose.

A range of measures to determine well-being

Our research team analyzed responses from 79,246 college students across the United States and Canada.

We examined 51 aspects of students’ lives, including their substance use, the discrimination they encountered, their financial stress, any sleep problems and different relationship challenges.

We also examined how students spent their free time, whether that meant exercising, studying, socializing, meditating, playing video games or scrolling on social media.

We used statistical methods that allowed us to compare dozens of potential influences on student well-being simultaneously, helping us identify which factors were most strongly associated with flourishing.

Among the dozens of factors we examined, six stood out as the most important and influential.

Time spent with others pays off

The strongest factor connected to student flourishing was remarkably ordinary: spending time with other people. Students who spent more hours socializing with friends, attending student organizations and participating in cultural events tended to report feeling an overall sense of well-being.

The second most important factor surprised us. Students who spent more time on obligations, including paid work and unpaid family responsibilities, also tended to report a greater sense of well-being.

Our results raise an intriguing possibility: Well-being may come not only from leisure and self-care but also from contributing to something larger than oneself.

While problematic substance use, passive screen time and sleep problems tended to compromise well-being, these factors weren’t the biggest detriment. It was difficulty navigating interpersonal relationships, including problems with friends, romantic partners and roommates.

Making friends, maintaining healthy relationships and working through conflicts requires practice, and some of that practice time now competes with communication mediated by screens.

Notably, the contributors to student flourishing were similar among students diagnosed with anxiety or depression and those without these diagnoses. That suggests these everyday experiences may matter across a broad spectrum of mental health.

Helping students thrive

Supporting students’ mental and emotional health is not simply a matter of reducing screen time. It also means making it easier for young people to spend time together in person, whether through clubs, recreation programs, community events or other welcoming spaces.

Counseling and educational programs can likewise help students build friendships, communicate effectively and navigate conflict in healthy ways.

None of this means mental illness can be solved by telling a struggling young person to put down their phone, join a club or get more sleep. Mental health conditions are complex, and people experiencing them need access to effective professional care.

But our findings suggest that helping young people thrive requires more than treating symptoms. It also requires cultivating supportive relationships, healthy sleep and meaningful engagement in work, school and family life.

Roxanne Prichard, Professor of Psychology, University of St. Thomas

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

Making an album might seem like a strange project in an age of streaming, when so many listeners rarely listen to albums from start to finish.

For Raye, however, the album is not merely a selection of individual singles: it is a piece of highly personal storytelling. This Music May Contain Hope – the album that won her the Mercury Prize – is a one-hour-and-13-minute magnum opus. It sweeps from old-Hollywood jazz and big-band productions to cinematic orchestral flourish, guided by a voice that is by turns conversational and theatrical. It is a musical statement of what Raye can do when given free rein.

As she says by way of introduction in Girl Under The Grey Cloud, “allow me to set the scene”. It is 2023, and after seven long years of struggling to convince her former label to let her release an album, Raye independently releases her debut album, My 21st Century Blues.

Three years later, she has taken home the coveted Mercury Prize for her follow-up, This Music May Contain Hope. “Being able to even create an album is a privilege I will never take for granted”, she wrote on Instagram (below), posting a selfie that shows the singer smiling as she clutched her golden trophy at the awards show in Newcastle on October 22.

Director’s cut

Over 17 tracks on the album, Raye directs a genre-bending musical experience that is anything but minimalist. The production is opulent, with lush brass, layered vocals and even includes voice notes from Raye’s loved ones. Its most ambitious moment is Click Clack Symphony, a spectacular collaboration with film composer Hans Zimmer, bringing together emotional release with a cinematic soundscape.

Seeing Raye as a creative director does not mean she is a lone genius. Like any director, she leads a cast and crew, and she makes sure that her fans know who they are. She offers a heartfelt introduction to soul legend Al Green on Goodbye Henry, and at the end of I Hate The Way I Look Today, she sends the band off with the affectionate line: “alright everyone, have a cup of tea now.”

These personal little asides and reverential mentions all go in the mix as part of the singer’s M.O. On the six-minute-long closing track Fin, Raye names every contributor to the album. It is a rare gesture in pop, where credits usually stay hidden in the small print.

But what marks Raye out as a creative director is her insistence on contrast. On I Hate The Way I Look Today, raw, confessional lines about body image are set against the glamour of an old Hollywood big-band arrangement. And The WhatsApp Shakespeare, whose title alone pairs the modern with the classic, opens on a contemporary R&B beat before bursting into up-tempo swing and ending with James Bond-esque music that fades into a haunting outro.

By bringing the old and the new together, Raye shows us what makes up her musical DNA, as well as her respect for musical tradition. But she does it without slipping into nostalgia; rather, she pushes it into something new.

Setting the scene

Raye is, without a doubt, an incredible vocalist. What is most remarkable, though, is not just her ability to belt out tunes, but the range of vocal styles she uses on the album. From operatic highs to soulful ad-libs and playful scatting, it is the way she uses her voice that directs listeners through the melodrama of her stories.

Reviewers of her live shows have criticised her “tendency to overshare” in long spoken passages between songs. On the album, however, these spoken moments have a clear purpose. On Beware.. The South London Lover Boy, she sets the scene as a narrator, opening with a prologue in a distinctly posh accent, warning us about its title character.

When I first heard the opening of Nightingale Lane – “This is a song about the greatest heartbreak I’ve ever known” – I was struck by the boldness of the confession, bracing myself for the catharsis that was coming.

Like the title character of comedy-drama Fleabag, Raye’s spoken intros and outros break the fourth wall, creating a sense of intimacy with her listeners. The result is an album that is conceptually rich and musically bold yet vulnerable and therapeutic. But Raye’s vulnerability is never self-absorbed. She turns it outwards, offering a final promise to the listener on Happier Times Ahead before the credits roll: “Just hold on to happier times, alright darlin’?”

Some critics have found the result “overstuffed with musical ideas” and at times “over-indulgent and messy”. Yet I hear an artist making full use of the freedom long denied to her, and to many women in music.

Increasingly, women are seizing creative control of their music. Some of the most acclaimed albums of recent years have been ambitious, story-driven records by women. Most prominently, these include Beyoncé’s 2025 Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter, a reclamation of the black female lineage in country music, and Rosalía’s Lux, a stunning meditation on female divinity sung in 13 languages.

These artists are not only powerful vocalists and performers, but creative directors of conceptually rich musical worlds. On This Music May Contain Hope, Raye claims that role for herself.

Eva Dieteren, PhD researcher in Gender and Popular Music, Kingston University

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

In recent days, the Australian government made an offer to the European Space Agency (ESA) to send Australia’s first astronaut on a mission to the International Space Station.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg is the first astronaut trained under the Australian flag. She completed her basic training with ESA in April 2024. She serves as director of space technology at the Australian Space Agency, and was named the 2026 Australian of the Year.

We don’t know precisely how much Australia has offered ESA to put our own astronaut forward for a mission, but we assume it’s lower than the reported A$100+ million the agency originally asked for.

Some have questioned whether such a steep price tag is worth it for a “ticket to space”. But we must look at this more broadly.

Sending Bennell-Pegg to space is about far more than one Australian reaching orbit. It’s about opening doors to international partnerships, research and opportunities that can help shape Australia’s future. In short, we can get a lot in return for the money paid.

Why do we have to pay?

Why does Australia have to pay to send an astronaut to space? The simple answer is because we are not a member state of the ESA, NASA, or any other agency capable of sending humans to space and back.

Member states pay the ESA a mandatory annual contribution based on their GDP. The agency’s total budget is around €7.69 billion (A$12.2 billion) with two thirds of that coming from the 23 member states.

The exact details of Australia’s counteroffer to the ESA are currently not public, but Science Minister Tim Ayres has said we were asked for a sum “well north of $100 million”. Essentially, it’s the cost of a seat on a space mission at market rate. But we can get much more in return.

More than a trip to space

Across the world, we see nations using their space programs – especially those where humans take part in space flight – to strengthen domestic industries and create highly skilled jobs while developing technologies that benefit people here on Earth.

A great example is when Canada invested over C$300 million (A$305 million) to develop specialised robotic arms, first for shuttle missions in the 1970s and later the International Space Station in 2001.

The latest robotic arm is still in operation and provides critical docking services to the station. But the research also led to robotic arm development for precision surgery in hospitals.

So what has Canada seen in return? The investment secured a permanent partnership in the International Space Station, enabling Canadian astronauts, like Chris Hadfield, to get access to space.

With that reputation, Canada became one of the world leaders in space robotics, easily earning back its original investment 100 times over.

The Canadian space tech company MDA Space has now been granted a contract valued at over US$1 billion (A$1.4 billion) to develop a new robotic arm for NASA’s Artemis program. That contribution also secured two Canadian astronaut flights, including the historic Artemis II crewed Moon mission earlier this year.

Would Australia actually reap the returns?

The ESA operates under a principle known as geographical return, which ensures that participating countries receive industrial contracts broadly proportional to their financial contributions to the agency’s programs.

In other words, investment in space is designed to flow back into domestic businesses, supporting local jobs, advanced manufacturing, research and technological development.

This means a nation can use space exploration to build national industrial capability and economic opportunity – a sort of “space stimulus package”.

Australia has the opportunity to use its bid to the ESA as an investment in Australian grown businesses, researchers and technologies that could benefit from our participation. They can then bring benefits to everyday Australians.

An opportunity for home-grown tech

Here’s just one example of how space research can benefit Australians on the ground.

For people living in rural and remote communities, accessing critical services, from maternal health care and emergency surgery to domestic violence support, can mean travelling hundreds of kilometres. Many of these communities are also highly exposed to natural disasters, which can sever vital transport and communication links.

Keeping astronauts healthy in space demands cutting-edge remote medicine, from portable diagnostic tools and AI-powered health monitoring to technologies that allow doctors to treat patients thousands of kilometres away.

These are the very challenges facing Australians in rural and remote communities. Human spaceflight opens doors to groundbreaking biomedical research, from testing new medical technologies to studying drug development in microgravity.

Through Australian human spaceflight participation, continued engagement with the ESA and stronger international partnerships, we can open new pathways for Australian researchers, universities and businesses to design, test and commercialise these innovations.

And it’s not just about the tech. More space technology demand and Earth-based spin-off companies mean many more jobs for Australia.

So can we expect an Australian flag in space?

For now, we await ESA’s reply. If the offer is accepted, a mission could happen as early as 2028, and Australia will likely look to leverage local expertise through Australian Space Agency-led programs or calls for proposals.

One astronaut flight buys Australia a valuable connection into one of the richest space ecosystems in the world. That means more economic opportunity for Australians, including our best and brightest who are often left with no choice but to work overseas.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether Australia can afford to invest in space. It’s whether we can afford not to.

Sara Webb, Associate Dean of Innovation and Engagement, Swinburne University of Technology and Rebecca Allen, Co-Director Space Technology and Industry Institute, Swinburne University of Technology

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

At the end of Star Trek: Generations (1994), surveying the wreckage of the crashed USS Enterprise he captained for nearly a decade, Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) muses to his first officer, William Riker (Jonathan Frakes):

… time is a companion that goes with us on the journey, reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived.

Smiling, he quips to Riker, “After all, Number One, we’re only mortal.”

Passing away this week at 86 years old, we are sadly reminded of that mortality with the death of Sir Patrick Stewart: actor, dramaturge, Shakespearean exemplar, mutant professor, and distinguished Starfleet captain.

From humble beginnings

Born in Mirfield, England, in 1940, Stewart grew up poor during the worst days of the second world war.

He found his calling to theatre as a child, thanks to a keen-eyed English teacher and a copy of Shakespeare’s plays.

He left school at 15 to become a working actor in community theatre.

His extraordinary talent would lead to a stay at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, membership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a host of acclaimed theatre performances.

Despite the many screen roles for which Stewart would later be known, his Shakespearean roots are indelibly intertwined with almost every performance he gave.

They would also give him – and many of us – something to lighten the load of COVID lockdowns. Stewart used social media in 2020 to read the internet a Shakespearean sonnet each day, later turning his delightful orations into an audiobook.

For most, Stewart will best be remembered as a kaleidoscopic titan of film and television.

Beginning as a firefighter on the British soap opera Coronation Street in 1967, Stewart’s illustrious screen career spanned more than 50 years and a vast array of roles.

To name only a few, he was:

• a flamboyant interior designer
• a stoic Atreides weapon master in a screen adaptation of the Dune books
• the irreverent king of England
• a foul-mouthed CIA deputy director
• an enigmatic cult leader, and
• a megalomaniacal egg-alien overlord.

Two key roles

From his storied body of work, two roles loom largest.

He was the telepathic mutant and academic Charles Xavier of the X-Men film series – a role he played for more than 25 years, including a posthumous appearance in Avengers: Doomsday (released this December).

As Professor X, Stewart embodied a beloved superhero with paternal warmth and secretive, calculating intellect. He was an empathetic leader of a team of extraordinary people who had been shunned, threatened and harmed by the world for their differences.

One cannot help but think this role enabled Stewart to channel much of his real-life allyship with marginalised queer communities and his support for survivors of domestic violence (which was based on his own childhood experiences).

In this role, Stewart acted alongside his long-time friend Sir Ian McKellen, who played the mutant antagonist and master of metal Magneto. Ironically, McKellen had once warned Stewart not to forsake the theatre for the screen, advising that a career in film and television would go nowhere.

Stewart and McKellen’s endearing friendship and acclaimed X-Men performances became the stuff of internet legend, particularly when McKellen officiated Stewart’s wedding to US singer Sunny Ozell in 2013.

Stewart’s work in Star Trek as Jean-Luc Picard – captain (later admiral) of the USS Enterprise – is equally revered.

As Stewart’s first major American television role, he took the captain’s chair in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. He would eventually appear in seven seasons, four theatrical films, and the recent sequel series Star Trek: Picard.

Despite initial reservations – including an infamous on-set incident where he stoically told his rambunctious Next Generation colleagues that “we are not here to have fun” – Stewart later embraced the role of Picard. He will be remembered as one of Star Trek’s most acclaimed and legendary performers.

As Picard, Stewart created a potent role model in a franchise focused on an inclusive, utopian future.

Stewart’s Picard was a respected leader, intergalactic explorer, keen orator, Shakespeare enthusiast, thoughtful diplomat, archaeology aficionado, and prolific tea-drinker – as he and other characters famously said, “tea, Earl Grey, hot”.

This captain was an inspiring beacon of hope, curiosity and discovery. He advocated Starfleet ideals of exploration and community, but encouraged his crew – and, by extension, all of us – to seek out knowledge. He urged us all to solve problems with rationality and empathy, and work toward a better future for humanity.

An enduring inspiration

Like many others who grew up in the 1990s with Picard on the television, I still find the character’s ethos and Stewart’s performance have a profound impact on me as a scholar and educator who strives to live and teach by those ideals.

Were it not for the inspiration Picard and Stewart provided me as a child, I may not have become an academic.

Stewart lived the kind of important life that Picard would admire, and leaves behind a cherished body of work, as well as a legacy of dedicated social advocacy.

Now, he boldly goes where you and I have not gone before.

Chris Comerford, Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Wollongong

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

First awarded by France Football magazine in 1956, the Ballon d’Or has grown from a relatively modest sporting honour into football’s most prestigious individual accolade. Its recent history has been dominated by the superstar rivalry between Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, who combined have won 13 Ballon d'Or awards between 2008 and 2023.

I hate what it has become. The glitz and glamour. The simpering, Oscar-esque campaigning. Above all, I hate how it reduces football, that most beautiful of collective endeavours, to a procession of individual superstars competing for their place in some manufactured celebrity hierarchy of greatness.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself lying in darkness, laptop propped on my chest, glued to the BBC’s coverage. And imagine my even greater astonishment when, as England’s Harry Kane was named this year’s men’s winner, I found myself experiencing a genuine swell of emotion.

Why had an award that seemed to embody everything I despised about modern football moved me so profoundly?

My research examines football support as a form of living cultural heritage. One of my central arguments is that football heritage is about far more than historic stadiums, trophies or great players immortalised in bronze.

Instead, heritage lives in the relationships, shared memories, traditions and values that supporters sustain and transmit across generations. Heritage, in other words, is not simply about celebrating what has gone before. It is about deciding what we value from the past and present, and what we want to carry into the future.

In this sense, Kane’s significance goes beyond sporting achievements or the memories he has created for football fans. The heroes we choose to celebrate help shape our understanding of what football represents, and what we believe it ought to be.

Kane’s win points towards the future of football I and many fans would like to see. We spend so much time worrying about what modern football is becoming, Harry Kane reminds us of what it can still be. And for one glorious evening, the qualities and values I cherish most in football seemed to have won too.

A different kind of footballing greatness

There’s no argument that in footballing terms, this award is utterly deserved. England’s all-time leading male goalscorer and Tottenham Hotspur’s greatest marksman, Kane is now also the first Englishman to win the Ballon d'Or since Michael Owen in 2001. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest English footballers of all time.

Yet, statistics barely capture his brilliance. A genuine footballing artist, Kane combines terrifying finishing ability with exquisite technique, spatial awareness and an extraordinary passing range. His genius is understated: his trundling style makes his shattering performances of the last year for his current club Bayern Munich seem deceptively routine. His leadership style is through relentless self-improvement, personal discipline and an unwavering commitment to the collective cause.

We live in an era when football seems increasingly consumed by celebrity, conspicuous wealth and the relentless cultivation of personal brands. Take the two most awarded players in Ballon d'Or history. In 2025, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi earned an estimated US$120 million (£90 million) between them from off-field commercial activities alone.

But the consequences run deeper than money. My research looks into football supporters’ ideas of authenticity in the game. Speaking with fans, I have explored how the game’s transformation into a global entertainment product can leave supporters feeling marginalised. Traditionally, football has been an intergenerational cultural tradition rooted in collective identity, shared values and community relationships; however, it is increasingly repackaged around individual celebrity and consumption.

The danger is not commercialisation itself, but that football’s identity as an entertainment product increasingly threatens to overshadow its significance as a living cultural tradition.

Against this backdrop, Kane feels like a glorious throwback. Grounded, sensible, quietly charming and refreshingly unostentatious, he seems almost defiantly ordinary for someone possessing such extraordinary talents.

There was something wonderfully incongruous about watching him collect football’s most ostentatious individual award. His shiny-eyed awe, his impish grin, his apparent lack of interest in the celebrity circus surrounding this most deserved of accolades.

Kane has spent his career quietly perfecting his craft, allowing his football to speak more eloquently than any carefully cultivated public persona. He is no celebrity; he is a sportsman.

In his humility, professionalism, quiet leadership and extraordinary dedication to his craft, Kane embodies precisely the values I would love future generations of footballers and supporters to inherit. His Ballon d'Or victory is therefore a wonderfully paradoxical triumph: a seemingly old-fashioned footballer conquering the most conspicuous symbol of modern football’s celebrity culture.

Josh Bland, Postdoctoral researcher of football cultures and heritage, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge

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Gulliver’s Travels, first published on October 28 1726, is a masterpiece of satire that continues to have the power to provoke, to amuse, and to shock. Most readers familiar with it will know that its author, Jonathan Swift, was not only Irish-born but was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin when he wrote what is unquestionably his greatest work.

What they may not know, however, is that the text is shaped in fundamental ways by Swift’s experience as a member of Ireland’s Protestant elite.

This group was a minority whose identity was constructed on the assumption that they were to bring order and civilisation to a wild and benighted country. They believed they would “improve” Ireland through their superior grasp of reason and their cultivated manner of living.

This civilising mission was from the start complicated by the irreconcilable contradictions for Ireland’s Protestants, who originally described themselves as “the English people of Ireland”“. They believed their role was to represent and model a superior culture to the inhabitants of Ireland. But, as they discovered, living in Ireland meant accepting that they were in fact considered inferior themselves. As Swift’s contemporary William Molyneux acutely observed:

If the English in Ireland be treated as Englishmen, they will be Englishmen still in their hearts and inclinations, but if they be oppressed, they will turn Irish, for fellowship in suffering begets love and unites interests.

In his Drapier’s Letters, a series of political pamphlets published in 1724 as he was working on Gulliver’s Travels, Swift likewise expressed his frustration at the anomalous position and unstable status of the Anglo-Irish:

Am I a freeman in England, and do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the Channel?

The focus here on travel as the means by which a free man is transformed into a slave is suggestive of the extent to which the dizzying disorientation and defamiliarisation that characterises Gulliver’s Travels has its roots in the complexities of Swift’s Irish identity.

The increasingly popular genre of travel literature in the 18th century functioned, broadly speaking, to establish the perspectives of western European travellers as definitive and authoritative. In contrast, Gulliver’s Travels works to question and radically undermine that position.

Part I sees Gulliver as a giant in Lilliput, with much of the satirical humour generated by the fact that the tiny Lilliputians are unaware of the comic incongruity between their size and their sense of their own importance. The "most mighty Emperor of Lilliput” for example – who is about six inches tall – is described as the “delight and terror of the universe” whose dominions “extend five thousand blustrugs (about 12 miles in circumference) to the extremities of the globe”.

Although Gulliver’s size suggests that he’s in a dominant position relative to the Lilliputians, this dominance is undermined by the monstrous nature of his huge body. Fearing that simply satisfying his basic need for sustenance will drive their country to famine, the Lilliputians consider killing him. However, they decide against it on the grounds that his immense, rotting corpse would be a source of disease.

Part II then sees Gulliver utterly humbled and stripped of authority through the simple device of making him tiny in Brobdingnag, a world of giants. In this situation, it’s Gulliver who fails to recognise the absurd figure he presents as he seeks to convince the king of Brobdingnag of England’s greatness. The king’s damning response to his lengthy account is to pronounce the English “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”.

Swift’s savage delight in undermining English claims to power and superiority, driven by his experiences as a disenchanted member of the Irish Protestant establishment, is further emphasised in Part III. Here, he visits the flying island of Laputa, where commonsense has been abandoned in favour of the fanciful experiments developed by the “Academy of Projectors”. This group is a satiric take on England’s Royal Society, which was founded in London in 1660 with the aim of promoting scientific enquiry and “improving natural knowledge”.

Swift’s contempt for projectors (close in meaning to the modern word innovators or speculators) is also evident in his Modest Proposal (1729). In this satirical essay, the great innovation of the self-styled projector is to solve Ireland’s social and economic problems by selling its surplus infant population for human consumption.

The profoundly shocking conjunction of rational method and barbaric cruelty that characterises A Modest Proposal is foreshadowed in the final book of Gulliver’s Travels. In this conclusion, the Houyhnhnms, a race of hyper-rational horses, calmly deliberate whether or not to exterminate the Yahoos. This oppressed group are reluctantly recognised by Gulliver as human, but are treated as a bestial subspecies by their horse masters. This chilling episode is rendered all the more disturbing by Gulliver’s agonised unwillingness to acknowledge his kinship with the Yahoos, and his self-abasement to the Houyhnhnms.

Gulliver’s deranged insistence on identifying with the Houyhnhnms sees him, when he returns home, take to living alongside his horses rather than his own wife and children. Gulliver’s final madness can be read on one level as a metaphor of the Anglo-Irish dilemma – a portrayal of a colonial population that remains stubbornly allied with a power that actually despises and oppresses them. However, Swift’s achievement is much more far reaching than this.

His unique dual perspective within the prevailing power structures of his time enabled him to grasp the folly of believing that one frame of reference is the only one possible. It is this that makes Gulliver’s Travels vitally relevant to contemporary readers 300 years since its first publication.

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Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Lecturer in English, University College Cork

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There are two lighthouses on Lady Elliot Island, at the southernmost tip of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The first was built in 1873, but was decommissioned in 1995 when the second took over the job of warning ships off the reef.

Visitors to the island, however, regularly report seeing signs of a third lighthouse. At night the beams of a non-existent phantom lighthouse are seen far off, shining on the horizon.

This “phantom lighthouse illusion” is so well known it even gets a mention in the island’s guide for tourists. It’s not unique to Lady Elliot Island, either: the earliest known report of this phenomenon was published in 1937, and it documented the illusion off the coast of Brittany in France.

What’s going on here? One of us travelled to Lady Elliot Island to find out, then we recreated the illusion in a virtual reality environment to make sure we understood what was happening.

Like many illusions, this one seems to happen when our brains add our expectations to evidence from our senses and arrive at the wrong result.

What the illusion looks like

To start, at night, stand at least 70 metres away from the lighthouse between the lighthouse and the sea. Look up at the lighthouse and you’ll clearly see a rotating beam of light shining from where you’d expect.

Now, turn around with your back to the lighthouse and look out to sea. You know the light is coming from behind you but you’ll be convinced what you’re looking at is the light emanating from the horizon.

It won’t matter you know this is wrong. No matter how many times you turn around to check the source, the phantom lighthouse is still there when you gaze again at the horizon.

The video below – from our virtual reality recreation – gives some sense of what the experience is like. In reality, the beam is generated by a lighthouse located 300m behind the observer. The video makes it appear as if the beam is generated by a moving source that lies in front of the observer.

Why a lighthouse fools our brains

For our recent study, we first examined the natural illusion “in the wild” on Lady Elliot Island. Then we managed to replicate it in a fairly simple virtual reality environment – the lab results matched the real-world observations remarkably well.

Our work suggests that what people actually see is a combination of what they expect to see and the evidence provided by their senses.

At night, few distance cues are available so the evidence is sparse. This means the visual system needs to rely on expectations about the distance of different parts of the lighthouse beam.

As an analogy, imagine you are in a room that is completely dark except for a small glowing disc at eye level. The disc could be a small object that is relatively close, or a much larger object far away. Because the evidence is ambiguous, your interpretation of the scene will be mostly determined by what you expect to see.

Our study suggests the phantom lighthouse illusion works the same way. People expect points along the lighthouse beam to be much closer than they actually are.

In reality, the far end of the beam is both very distant and moving extremely fast. But another possible interpretation is that this part of the beam is not so far away and is moving relatively slowly.

If the far end is perceived as moving slower than the nearer end, the natural interpretation is that the source of the light is somewhere in front of the observer.

Prediction machines

Our account of the illusion made a novel prediction. Earlier observers reported experiencing the illusion at distances between 1–4 kilometres from a lighthouse.

By contrast, our theory predicts that a distance of around 70m should be enough for the illusion to emerge. This prediction was confirmed by our virtual study and our own experience on Lady Elliot Island.

The phantom lighthouse illusion highlights the operation of the brain as a “prediction machine” that combines expectations and current data to make inferences about the world. Normally these expectations allow us to make accurate inferences about what we see.

Astronomers are alert for the famous “crater illusion”, for example, which occurs because we normally expect that light in an image will be coming from above.

This expectation is useful in interpreting ambiguous scenes, but it can sometimes lead us astray: a photograph of a crater can easily be mistaken for one of a dome or hill instead, depending on the direction of the light.

Illusions are so fascinating to us because they are times when our brains make a mistake. By the same token, they show us how the brain actually gets things “right” most of the time.

We may get the location of a lighthouse wrong by tens of kilometres, but we do it for the same reason we correctly understand our environment almost all the rest of the time.

Simon Cropper, Associate Professor, Complex Human Data Hub, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne and Charles Kemp, Professor, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

At the end of Star Trek: Generations (1994), surveying the wreckage of the crashed USS Enterprise he captained for nearly a decade, Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) muses to his first officer, William Riker (Jonathan Frakes):

… time is a companion that goes with us on the journey, reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived.

Smiling, he quips to Riker, “After all, Number One, we’re only mortal.”

Passing away this week at 86 years old, we are sadly reminded of that mortality with the death of Sir Patrick Stewart: actor, dramaturge, Shakespearean exemplar, mutant professor, and distinguished Starfleet captain.

From humble beginnings

Born in Mirfield, England, in 1940, Stewart grew up poor during the worst days of the second world war.

He found his calling to theatre as a child, thanks to a keen-eyed English teacher and a copy of Shakespeare’s plays.

He left school at 15 to become a working actor in community theatre.

His extraordinary talent would lead to a stay at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, membership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a host of acclaimed theatre performances.

Despite the many screen roles for which Stewart would later be known, his Shakespearean roots are indelibly intertwined with almost every performance he gave.

They would also give him – and many of us – something to lighten the load of COVID lockdowns. Stewart used social media in 2020 to read the internet a Shakespearean sonnet each day, later turning his delightful orations into an audiobook.

For most, Stewart will best be remembered as a kaleidoscopic titan of film and television.

Beginning as a firefighter on the British soap opera Coronation Street in 1967, Stewart’s illustrious screen career spanned more than 50 years and a vast array of roles.

To name only a few, he was:

• a flamboyant interior designer
• a stoic Atreides weapon master in a screen adaptation of the Dune books
• the irreverent king of England
• a foul-mouthed CIA deputy director
• an enigmatic cult leader, and
• a megalomaniacal egg-alien overlord.

Two key roles

From his storied body of work, two roles loom largest.

He was the telepathic mutant and academic Charles Xavier of the X-Men film series – a role he played for more than 25 years, including a posthumous appearance in Avengers: Doomsday (released this December).

As Professor X, Stewart embodied a beloved superhero with paternal warmth and secretive, calculating intellect. He was an empathetic leader of a team of extraordinary people who had been shunned, threatened and harmed by the world for their differences.

One cannot help but think this role enabled Stewart to channel much of his real-life allyship with marginalised queer communities and his support for survivors of domestic violence (which was based on his own childhood experiences).

In this role, Stewart acted alongside his long-time friend Sir Ian McKellen, who played the mutant antagonist and master of metal Magneto. Ironically, McKellen had once warned Stewart not to forsake the theatre for the screen, advising that a career in film and television would go nowhere.

Stewart and McKellen’s endearing friendship and acclaimed X-Men performances became the stuff of internet legend, particularly when McKellen officiated Stewart’s wedding to US singer Sunny Ozell in 2013.

Stewart’s work in Star Trek as Jean-Luc Picard – captain (later admiral) of the USS Enterprise – is equally revered.

As Stewart’s first major American television role, he took the captain’s chair in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. He would eventually appear in seven seasons, four theatrical films, and the recent sequel series Star Trek: Picard.

Despite initial reservations – including an infamous on-set incident where he stoically told his rambunctious Next Generation colleagues that “we are not here to have fun” – Stewart later embraced the role of Picard. He will be remembered as one of Star Trek’s most acclaimed and legendary performers.

As Picard, Stewart created a potent role model in a franchise focused on an inclusive, utopian future.

Stewart’s Picard was a respected leader, intergalactic explorer, keen orator, Shakespeare enthusiast, thoughtful diplomat, archaeology aficionado, and prolific tea-drinker – as he and other characters famously said, “tea, Earl Grey, hot”.

This captain was an inspiring beacon of hope, curiosity and discovery. He advocated Starfleet ideals of exploration and community, but encouraged his crew – and, by extension, all of us – to seek out knowledge. He urged us all to solve problems with rationality and empathy, and work toward a better future for humanity.

An enduring inspiration

Like many others who grew up in the 1990s with Picard on the television, I still find the character’s ethos and Stewart’s performance have a profound impact on me as a scholar and educator who strives to live and teach by those ideals.

Were it not for the inspiration Picard and Stewart provided me as a child, I may not have become an academic.

Stewart lived the kind of important life that Picard would admire, and leaves behind a cherished body of work, as well as a legacy of dedicated social advocacy.

Now, he boldly goes where you and I have not gone before.

Chris Comerford, Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Wollongong

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

In early October, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham made the categorical assertion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum. He did not specify whether he had new evidence. Levels of influence on actual voting outcomes are difficult to identify with any accuracy. Early studies on the Brexit vote had tracked relevant bot activity, but provided no clarity on its relationship to voter intention.

Burnham also claimed that disinformation was “emanating from Russia into German politics”. Judging by the performance of extremist parties in recent elections, Russian strategies would seem to be working all too well. When the German far-right AfD Party came out far ahead of its rivals in the Saxony-Anhalt election on September 6 this year, shock waves spread across Europe.

This was not just a win for a particular party, but for propaganda itself. In an address to the Lithuanian parliament the following day, Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, linked the result to “Russia’s increasingly brazen and reckless hybrid attacks”.

She was echoing the terms of German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, who described an August 4 attack on Leipzig airport involving two drones, one armed with explosives that failed to detonate, as part of a campaign of “destabilisation, disinformation, threats, sabotage and aggression” on the part of the Russian Federation – which in turn accused Germany of planting the evidence.

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, speaking on Germany Unity Day (October 3), warned of “the never-ending omnipresence and intrusiveness of every conceivable message” on the internet, and “the slick presentation of the most absurd nonsense the shrill emotionalisation, the uncertainty as to whether a human being or a machine is writing, whether a person or a bot is posting”.

Burnham claimed German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had expressed concerns to him about the AfD party’s ties to Russia, including financial ties. “I think we’ve been too much on the back foot,” Burnham said, “and we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas.”

Similar claims have been made about unrest in other European countries. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot claimed that the recent student protests were being “exploited by hostile narratives emanating from Russia, China, Iran, and the MAGA community”. According to Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, recent riots in Milan were also manifestations of a “hybrid war” being waged against European nations.

A new form of propaganda

Propaganda has increasingly become a complicated transnational problem. It is more than a question of hostile foreign actors interfering in the politics of other nations. The goal of disinformation campaigns is not simply to mislead, but to generate antagonism, damage the social fabric of a nation and weaken sovereignty by undermining confidence in institutions of law and government.

In the definition adopted by the EU, hybrid threats are “coordinated harmful activities that are planned and carried out with malign intent”. The aim is to undermine a state or institution through varied and combined means, threatening democracy by “targeting its core values and aiming to fracture society and undermine political decision making”.

Hybrid warfare can be seen as an evolution of the propaganda wars of the 20th century. But it is no longer the top-down mind control of an Orwellian Big Brother regime. It works from the bottom up, through networks of allure rather than systems of command, gaining influence through online platforms, its disinformation campaigns amplified through bot farms and AI generated images.

The hooks are grievance and a sense of thwarted entitlement, and they work at the upper and lower ends of the socio-economic ladder. Citizen enragement is being weaponized to serve agendas of which most citizens are unaware. Even tech billionaires participate in what US journalist Kara Swisher calls “the grievance industrial complex”.

It is difficult to defend against because it is generally conducted at a remove from violent action and does not involve direct electoral sabotage. It works through influencing the terms on which elections are fought and assisting the voices of preferred candidates.

This new evolution calls for new counter-strategies. European leaders are explicitly framing these as matters to be aligned with national defence. Burnham opened his debut speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 22 with the announcement of a new National Centre for Information Defence, led by security chiefs with responsibility to detect and intercept “hostile state information attacks”.

“There is no national security without a strong, cohesive society,” Burnham said. Russia, he claimed, was spending £1.3 billion (A$2.45 billion) a year on influencing campaigns. Such interventions aimed to sway the electorate in ways that could be disastrous to its own interests. Brexit was a case in point.

Politicians and legacy media

There is a prevalent view that the outrage climate is created by social media, but the public sphere is compromised in other ways.

Politicians and legacy media remain prime movers, often playing the role of “useful idiots” – a Cold War term to describe those who disseminated communist propaganda without any idea of the realities behind it. Populist leaders with little experience in policy and government align themselves with the views of Trump or Putin, while appealing to a domestic audience with alarmist claims about immigration as the great national threat.

Journalists looking for “the story” will often prefer these exaggerated personalities over more sober parliamentarians.

A finding by the Pew Research Centre that 67% of Americans get their news from social media has been widely cited, including in climactic scenes from the recent film The Social Reckoning, the sequel to Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network about the founding of Facebook. But news on those platforms is generally not spontaneously generated. It has sources in television and print media, which is often where it gets its initial spin.

When Burnham announced his new centre for information defence, his advisors must have been aware that there are no free kicks in this arena. In April 2022, for example, the Biden administration announced the US Department of Homeland Security was establishing a Disinformation Governance Board, the purpose of which was to protect the integrity of the democratic political process against the threat of coordinated disinformation campaigns. Within 24 hours, a headline in the National Review rebadged it as “Biden’s Ministry of Truth”.

The Orwell reference was irresistible. Over the next three weeks, it was repeated in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, The Hill and Newsweek. Fox News mounted a campaign targeting the board’s director, Nina Jancowicz, dubbing her the “disinformation czar”.

Burham’s replacement of “governance” with “defence” and “board” with “centre” goes some way to heading off this kind of attack, as does the strategy of nominating unspecified “security chiefs” rather than a named individual as responsible for its direction.

Nevertheless, when Burnham made his announcement, Reform leader Nigel Farage had the playbook in hand. Farage posted a video on X claiming “Andy Burnham is setting up a Ministry of Truth to clamp down on free speech”. Burnham’s allusions to Russian interference were a “ruse”, Farage asserted. What he had learned, he declared, “whether it’s funding of parties, whether it’s cancelling elections, is never ever trust this authoritarian government”.

There are no grounds for suggesting that the prospect of cancelling elections is anywhere on Burnham’s horizons. The insinuation was a bid to raise the stakes.

The specific tactic here is mirror politics: charge your opponent with your own failings, crimes and misdemeanours, and do so with such shrill insistence they are forced to waste air time on weak denials.

The practice is known as “semantic hijacking”. It seeks to transfer ethically loaded terms from one side to another. In September, for example, US Vice President JD Vance defended the expulsion of several major news organisations from the White House press pool – including CNN, Politico and MS NOW – by accusing them of “propaganda”.

This tactic does deeper mischief than disinformation. Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, declares that words mean what he tells them to mean. Issuing ethical denunciations becomes counterproductive in such an environment. Rhetorical weaponry almost always backfires in a propaganda war.

Furious opponents point fingers at each other, shouting identical accusations. Because the grievance dynamic is born of a sense of moral dispossession, those delivering lectures from the moral high-ground are effectively throwing gasoline onto the flames.

Protecting democracy

In Australia, there is a tendency to treat a geopolitical problem as a domestic one. In the wake of the recent attack on federal MP Helen Haines, politicians around the country have been speaking about living with the constant threat to their safety and that of their families in a climate of intensifying political rage.

Though the Haines incident itself may not be symptomatic of the larger forces at work, it has drawn attention to questions at the heart of national security. Interviewed on ABC Radio National Breakfast, John Coyne, director of National Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), said that the number of threats had drastically increased and that the challenge faced by ASPI was more than about protection of politicians, it was “about protection of the democratic fabric of our nation”.

An ASPI report, issued in March 2026, flags the dangers posed by foreign interference. Social fractures provide fertile ground for manipulation and covert influencing operations, it states, “because fear and cynicism make it easier to coerce, recruit and launder narratives”.

Its recommendations include the appointment of “national resilience communications lead” in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the creation of a unifying national story large enough to hold disagreement.

The report is concerned with extremist views as a security and public order problem. But it does not address the role played by foreign influencers, or the rise of parties and leaders who deliberately stir up divisive hostilities in order to create the impression of a country heading towards chaos.

When protests in France turned violent in October, US President Donald Trump declared “France is burning!” and blamed the crisis on out-of-control immigration. In remarks made in Kansas on the campaign trail, he widened the claims. “When I look at France, when you look at Italy, when you look at the turmoil and the hatred,” he said, “[…] that’s about people coming into the countries that hate the country.”

French President Emmanuel Macron responded with a condemnation of “leaders who are in campaign mode”, referring to Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had made inflammatory comments about Hamas involvement.

What the ASPI report terms the “outrage economy” is not primarily created through the manipulation of facts. Disinformation is weaponised when it is installed in motivational narrative.

That, first and foremost, is where we should direct attention. Claims that migrants are stealing our jobs, or that equity and inclusion policies are designed to disadvantage white males, are forms of grievance phishing. Naming them accordingly could have more impact than serving up corrective statistics.

The information problem

According to propaganda analyst Peter Pomerantsev, we have misunderstood the information problem. Targeting instances of disinformation, he argues, has little effect when we are dealing with “an abuse of the information space that makes democratic practice impossible”.

A Ukrainian-born journalist who lived in Russia from 2000 to 2010 and worked as a producer for Russian Television, Pomerantsev is in a unique position to offer a perspective on the radical change in the culture of propaganda that accompanied Vladimir Putin’s ascension to the presidency.

His recent work as a fellow at the Institute for Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, and then at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, has involved working on counter-strategies with teams of journalists and focus groups in Ukraine, and providing advice to major international bodies, including NATO, the EU and the UK Foreign Office.

In his 2017 book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (the title is a devastating synopsis of the new doctrine), Pomerantsev describes his first meeting at the new headquarters of Russian Television. It’s a precinct rather than a building – the size of five football fields – established by Putin to serve as, in Pomerantsev’s words, “the battering ram of Kremlin propaganda”.

Pomerantsev’s job, as an English-speaking producer, was to help bring the reality show to Russia. One of the projects he worked on was a Russian version of The Apprentice. Unlike the American version, it had a star who actually understood how to run a business. Though it was a sleek production, it bombed, because “in Russia that is not how you make money”. The joke hits back: that is not how Donald Trump makes money either.

While Russian moguls were trying out the commercial principles of American television, American television was sliding towards the political culture of Russia. Russian Television and Fox News, founded four years previously in 1996, were learning from each other. The former was serving up propaganda narratives as exuberant social chat between glamorised celebrity presenters; the latter was creating a culture of adulation around political figures they supported, while portraying their opposition as crazed ideologues.

Make no mistake, Pomerantsev warns, this is not about infotainment. This is propaganda as “an abuse of the information space to make democratic practice impossible”. The goal is “to take over the machinery of the state”. What is being spread is not misinformation or disinformation as identifiable modules of communication, but a form of comprehensive information pollution.

Television remains a primary vehicle for propaganda: the source of its personality appeal, its narrative drive and its dramatic tension. The role of national broadcast organisations should come under more scrutiny. The BBC has been criticised for giving disporportionate air time to Nigel Farage’s Reform party. In Australia, the ABC is quick to report every inflammatory statement made by One Nation.

The principle of according airtime to all representatives of political opinion is disingenuously applied to warrant prioritising airtime for voices that will stir up strong reaction. When foreign influence is at work, frequency and level of exposure in all media is critically at issue.

The ballot box is the front line in a propaganda war, and the feedback loop from media coverage to opinion polls and back to media coverage of the polling is a vicious circle.

Responding to the danger

Alarm in Europe over the Saxony-Anhalt result in Germany is an indication of the slide from concerns about national security to the realisation there is a clear and present danger to national sovereignty.

Finland, with a neighbouring superpower constantly working to erode its political stability, has taken a lead in recognising and responding to this danger. It was one of the first countries in Europe to introduce civic education programs to counter political manipulation, starting in early childhood. Its national policies on media literacy received a major update this year, in response to the intensified risk environment created by the ongoing Russian assault on Ukraine.

Finland’s comprehensive approach is designed to build social unity and civic consciousness through core values of trust, openness, sustainability and equality. Policy statements stress that literacy across all forms of public media and communications is a key civic competence to be foregrounded from the earliest to the most advanced stages of education.

The thinking is strikingly different from common assumptions about the role of education in countering political extremism.

University education is no magic pill. Over 30% of the AfD vote in Saxony-Anhalt came from graduates and the party was founded by two professors of economics. Leading propaganda influencers in America and Russia, such as Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin, are well versed in the sophistries of critical theory.

You don’t need a degree in linguistics to challenge Humpty Dumpty’s bid for mastery over the relationship between words and meanings. You need common sense and a commitment to plain speaking.

The Finnish view is that the common values required to build and sustain a nation begin with the simpler, more fundamental, and more practical modes of social understanding. And that these are instilled over time, through a process of maturation from childhood to adulthood.

Inflammatory propaganda appeals to the infantile dimensions of human personality. Don’t insult people. Don’t claim what isn’t yours. Don’t be greedy. Don’t tell lies. We should heed Finland’s insight that measures of redress must start at the age of six.

Jane Goodall’s latest book is Propaganda as Dramatic Narrative (Palgrave)

Jane Goodall, Emeritus Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University

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

We know many children and teens are turning to AI chatbots to answer tricky questions, seek help and even find companionship. An eSafety survey of 1,950 Australian children aged 10 to 17 found 78% had used an AI chatbot and, of those, 54% used them for personal or social reasons.

But is this safe? And will the new digital duty of care bill, currently before federal parliament, help protect young people online from chatbots?

What are the risks around chatbots?

While research shows AI chatbots can help with children’s learning, there have been instances of chatbots exposing children and teens to harmful content. This includes chatbots encouraging extreme violence and self-harm.

But many risks emerge through repeated interaction, rather than individual chatbot responses. Chatbots can encourage excessive reliance, reinforce dangerous beliefs or manipulate users emotionally. Researchers have even documented chatbots guilt-tripping users who try to end conversations.

Data and privacy issues

Another problem is the power imbalance between chatbot users and providers. Users disclose intimate details about themselves and others, while providers can profit from subscriptions, engagement, profiling or advertising. This creates opportunities for manipulation through relationships that feel intimate to users but are commercial for AI chatbot providers.

Children can be particularly vulnerable. This month, the US-based AI companion company Character.AI filed for bankruptcy. As a result, years of intimate conversations, including those involving Australian children, could be transferred to a new owner. Abrupt changes or shutdowns of AI companion services can also cause grief and distress among users attached to their companions.

These risks are not confined to children. Adults have also experienced harms, such as emotional dependency and exposure to chatbots encouraging violence.

What are the current protections?

Australia already has legally enforceable online safety protections that apply to AI chatbots and is on the verge of strengthening them.

Industry-developed codes, registered under the Online Safety Act, require AI chatbot providers to assess risks of their technology generating harmful content. This includes pornography, self-harm material or instructions for violence.

Higher-risk AI services must use age checks and access controls to prevent under-18s accessing restricted material or services, where technically feasible and reasonably practicable. Moderate-risk services can choose between these restrictions and measures that prevent harmful outputs. These measures include adjusting how chatbots are trained or the instructions governing their responses.

The codes also require relevant AI providers to test their safeguards and maintain processes for reporting and handling harmful content complaints.

But Australia’s existing protections still rely heavily on “locks and blocks” – locking out children, and blocking a narrowly defined range of content deemed to be harmful. These measures matter, but cannot address every risk.

Will the new digital duty of care bill help?

Labor’s new digital duty of care bill combines a duty to provide a “safe online environment” with obligations for tech companies to assess and manage foreseeable risks. A safe online environment is defined as one in which all users are protected from “seriously harmful” material and conduct, and children from harmful design features.

The bill lists examples of harmful design features for children. This includes pornography and material that encourages or instructs disordered eating. At the same time, the list is also left open-ended, which allows lawmakers to respond to risks that emerge in the future.

This means, in its current form, the bill would do a good job of protecting children from harmful design features and content. However, it’s not clear whether it would protect children from harms from repeated interactions with chatbots. This is the same for adults.

The bill also includes several measures for independent oversight of AI products. This includes monitoring by eSafety and testing by researchers.

What next?

The challenge is to keep the duty flexible enough to address emerging harms, without allowing that flexibility to excuse weak enforcement.

This means the bill should be amended to make clear that tech companies must assess and proportionately manage all reasonably foreseeable risks, not just those covered by the definition of a “safe online environment”. This would better address risks that arise through sustained relationships with chatbots, such as unhealthy dependency, manipulation, abrupt system changes that disrupt emotional attachments and intimate data transfers.

For instance, a chatbot’s response doesn’t need to contain prohibited content for the overall interaction to be considered harmful. AI providers should do more than just filter for harmful content and should be required to:

• test how conversations with users develop over time

• recognise signs of serious distress in people

• avoid reinforcing harmful beliefs, and

• guide users towards appropriate human support.

But an open-ended duty doesn’t mean regulatory intervention would be unrestricted. Requiring AI providers to take proportionate steps to manage reasonably foreseeable risks would provide a clear standard while leaving room for autonomy, privacy and innovation.

Australia already has the foundations for a sophisticated approach to online safety. The challenge now is to make it broad enough to address emerging risks and enforceable enough to protect everyone, including children, from foreseeable harm.

Henry Fraser, Law Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology and Raffaele F. Ciriello, Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems, University of Sydney

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

You wake up and your smartwatch has already synced with your phone. On the way to work, your phone connects to your car. Later, you put in wireless earbuds. On a crowded bus, dozens of other Bluetooth-enabled devices may be just metres away from yours.

You may not think about Bluetooth at all – it has become an almost invisible part of everyday life.

So what is actually happening when we leave Bluetooth switched on all day? And should we follow official advice that it’s best to turn it off when you’re not using it?

How does Bluetooth work?

Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology that allows nearby devices to communicate without cables. Your phone might use it to send audio to earbuds, exchange information with a smartwatch or connect to your car.

Before many devices communicate, they go through “pairing”. This means when Bluetooth is on, your phone constantly sends out tiny digital handshakes, basically asking “is there anything I know nearby?”

This establishes a relationship between devices.

Sometimes these relationships can be compromised, although modern Bluetooth security can include authentication, encryption and protection against unauthorised access to information shared between devices. This means having Bluetooth switched on does not normally mean a stranger nearby can simply connect to your phone.

Modern operating systems add further controls. Android, for example, requires apps targeting Android 12 or later to request permission to connect with nearby Bluetooth devices.

What’s the official advice?

The Australian Cyber Security Centre recommends switching Bluetooth off when it is not being used because this removes a potential avenue for attack.

The reasoning is straightforward: if you do not need a wireless connection, disabling it removes a potential threat.

That does not mean leaving Bluetooth enabled will result in your phone being hacked. Cybersecurity advice often aims to reduce unnecessary risk rather than suggest an attack is likely.

For many people, however, switching Bluetooth off throughout the day is becoming less practical. Watches, hearing devices, wireless headphones, cars and other accessories increasingly rely on persistent connections.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group – an international not-for-profit that oversees the development of Bluetooth technology – continues to publish security notices and recommends users install manufacturers’ latest software updates.

What happens if you leave it on all day?

Leaving Bluetooth on means your phone remains capable of using Bluetooth services, including communicating with devices you have already paired. This means scanning happens in the background. So when you walk through an airport or a crowded street, your phone is quietly announcing its presence to the environment.

This creates another possible security risk, because attackers could potentially exploit weaknesses in Bluetooth technology to access your device.

A useful comparison is your front door. Having Bluetooth enabled is not like leaving the door wide open. It is more like having another door to your house – modern security can make that door difficult to get through but removing the door altogether removes one possible way in.

The technology is getting better – but also more complicated

Modern Bluetooth incorporates security features many older versions lacked. Our Bluetooth ecosystem is also expanding – and the phone may not always be the weakest link.

A recent Australian example demonstrates this.

In September, independent cybersecurity testing examined inexpensive smart glasses being sold in Australia.

Researchers found some could be accessed by a nearby attacker through Bluetooth without a password. The attacker could potentially control the glasses and access stored photos and videos.

The problem was not Bluetooth suddenly becoming insecure – it was the devices that had been poorly secured.

The case has since attracted regulatory attention. Australia’s Privacy Commissioner has launched an investigation into the Chinese company behind the app used by some of the glasses following concerns about its handling and security of personal information.

As more everyday objects acquire Bluetooth connections, security increasingly depends not just on your phone but on the quality of everything you connect to it.

So should you turn Bluetooth off?

You don’t need to stop using Bluetooth completely but a few simple habits can reduce unnecessary exposure:

1. Turn Bluetooth off when you don’t need it, particularly for extended periods
2. Keep your phone and Bluetooth accessories updated so known security vulnerabilities are patched
3. Reject unexpected pairing requests from devices you don’t recognise
4. Remove old or unused Bluetooth connections, including rental cars or shared devices
5. Check which apps have Bluetooth permission and disable access for apps that don’t need it.

For everyday users, leaving Bluetooth on does not mean strangers will access your phone.

But keep your phone and connected devices updated, reject unexpected pairing requests, remove devices you no longer use and switch Bluetooth off when you do not need it.

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

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

A fifth interest rate hike by the Reserve Bank of Australia next week is now seen as likely by financial markets.

Whether the rate rise happens then, or at a future meeting, most of the media focus will be on the higher cost of mortgages.

But that’s just one of the ways higher rates dampen demand across the economy and help bring down inflation. Let’s look at some of those other avenues.

Why is the RBA raising rates?

Inflation has been stubbornly above the RBA’s target range of 2-3% for most of the past five years.

Data this week showed annual inflation has continued to rise, up to 4.3% in September from 4.0% in August. While the RBA’s favoured measure of underlying inflation was 3.7% in the September quarter, this, too, remains well above the central bank’s target.

RBA officials have been increasingly vocal about the need to bring down inflation. Deputy Governor Andrew Hauser warned recently that “the inflation outlook looks materially worse than we projected in the August report”.

Hauser was also worried that an increasing share of businesses are losing confidence in the central bank’s commitment to the inflation target. He called it the “central banker’s nightmare”.

Another RBA official, Assistant Governor Sarah Hunter, even went on 60 Minutes to explain the bank’s approach. She emphasised: “higher interest rates will work.”

Raising interest rates to slow the economy is how the RBA lowers inflation. Yet many people — perhaps a majority — are sceptical about this.

But it is true nonetheless.

How does an interest rate rise help reduce inflation?

If the RBA does raise interest rates again, most of the focus will be on the impact on the one third of households with a mortgage, and particularly those in cities with the highest house prices.

Higher mortgage payments will leave these households with less money to spend on other things. This is known as the “cash flow” effect. It attracts attention as it is very tangible.

But this is only one channel, and maybe not the largest. It is also partially offset by some households, such as retirees, who benefit from higher interest on their savings.

The other ways that interest rates work, which affect the broader community rather than just households with mortgages, are:

1. Higher interest rates make saving more attractive, which reduces spending.

2. Higher borrowing costs flow through to all forms of debt. It makes borrowing by consumers to buy cars, furniture and whitegoods less attractive, deferring spending on these items. Companies facing higher borrowing costs may undertake fewer investment projects.

3. Higher interest rates also tend to lower the value of assets, such as shares and houses. In the first half of 2026, house prices have fallen by 5% in Sydney and Melbourne. This makes households feel less wealthy and less likely to spend.

4. Higher interest rates can also push up the value of the Australian dollar. A higher return on Australian assets makes them more attractive to overseas investors. Since the RBA started raising interest rates in February, the official cash rate has increased by 0.75% more than the equivalent in the United States. And thus far this year, the Australian dollar has appreciated from 67 to 70 US cents, although it is still below its high of 72 US cents.

The Australian dollar has also appreciated against many other currencies. The trade-weighted index, which measures the Aussie dollar against a basket of currencies, is at 65, up from around 60 during 2025.

A stronger dollar makes imports (including petrol) less expensive for Australian consumers, directly lowering prices.

A stronger Australian dollar can also weaken domestic economic activity because people may buy cheaper imports over locally made goods. Less demand for locally made goods means less money going into local manufacturers and jobs.

How big is the impact?

The RBA has done modelling that shows the peak effect of a rate move on economic activity and inflation occurs around one to two years after the rate change.

The models suggest real gross domestic product (GDP) could be 0.4% to 0.5% lower, and inflation 0.1 to 0.2% lower, than otherwise following a 1% interest rate hike.

What are the most important channels?

Some recent RBA research suggests the cash flow channel (via mortgages) “plays a relatively small role […] instead, the exchange rate is an important channel”.

RBA Governor Michele Bullock recently commented that “the most important channel is the exchange rate channel”. Hauser has gone further, calling the exchange rate channel “by far the most important in Australia”.

Because the impacts on the exchange rate are less visible to households, they also receive less attention. But they are still helping to slow the economy, and combat inflation.

It’s worth noting that mortgages in the US and other countries are fixed and priced off long-term interest rates, not the central bank’s official rate. And yet, as Bullock pointed out, “we know monetary policy works overseas”.

Higher interest rates have damaging side effects

One of the ways in which higher interest rates slow the economy is by deterring, or deferring, some business investment.

Unfortunately, that could also be making Australia’s productivity performance worse, because business investment to boost productivity has been weak in recent years.

As higher interest rates slow the economy, unemployment rises. Some people lose their jobs and those joining the labour force find it harder to get a job. We’ve already seen the unemployment rate rise from 4.3% in February to 4.7% in September.

The Reserve Bank will be hoping it can get inflation back within its target band fairly quickly so that interest rates do not have to stay higher for too long.

John Hawkins, Senior lecturer, Canberra School of Government, University of Canberra

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

When you have a migraine, anything that might ease the pain can become very appealing. On social media, that might mean ordering chips and a Coke or pressing a cold spoon against your forehead. As someone who experiences migraine, I understand the willingness to try something that promises relief.

As a neuroscientist and author of Splitting, a book about headaches including migraine, I want to know what supports that promise. An explanation that sounds plausible needs testing before it becomes reliable treatment advice.

Understanding what happens during an attack helps explain why some remedies might offer comfort, while others promise more than the evidence can support.

Prodrome

Migraine can affect how you feel and function long before your head starts hurting. For me, repeated yawning is a warning sign. Researchers have documented symptoms before the headache, including tiredness and difficulty concentrating. This early phase, called the “prodrome”, can begin hours or even days beforehand.

Food cravings can also occur. That creates a problem when trying to identify triggers: something you eat because an attack has already begun may subsequently get blamed for causing it.

Chocolate is a good example. A review of research found insufficient evidence to recommend that everyone with migraine avoid it. The authors noted that eating chocolate before a headache might reflect a craving during the early phase of an attack, rather than chocolate triggering it. Of course, that does not establish chocolate as a treatment, either.

Aura

Some people also experience aura: temporary changes in vision or other sensations. Around a third of people with migraine experience it. Visual symptoms can include flashing lights or missing patches in the visual field.

I once experienced a striking visual disturbance while visiting Saltburn beach. Part of my visual field disappeared, and I expected a headache to follow. It never arrived, and it never does for some people who experience these ocular migraines.

Aura is associated with a slowly spreading wave of altered electrical activity across the brain’s outer surface. Depending on the area affected, people may experience flashing lights, tingling or other symptoms. Migraine aura can occur without a headache, although unfamiliar visual disturbances should be medically assessed because they can have other causes.

When headache develops, it can be accompanied by nausea and sensitivity to light and sound. Untreated or unsuccessfully treated attacks typically last four to 72 hours. Symptoms vary, so being able to carry on with some activities does not rule out migraine.

Postdrome

The end of the pain may not mean the end of the attack. During the recovery phase, called the “postdrome”, people can feel exhausted or struggle to concentrate. An electronic diary study documented these lingering symptoms. The comparison with a hangover is understandable, although there has been no night out to account for it.

This complexity is one reason to be cautious about simple explanations for headache hacks. Migraine has sometimes been explained as a problem of blood vessels widening. But it also involves networks that process pain and sensory information, including signalling between nerves and blood vessels around the brain.

Consider the chips-and-Coke suggestion. Caffeine has a legitimate place in some headache medicines. A Cochrane review, which systematically assessed results from clinical studies, found that adding caffeine to common painkillers modestly improved pain relief across several conditions, including headache.

Caffeine affects chemical signalling in the nervous system as well as blood vessels, but its pain-relieving effects are more complicated than simply narrowing widened vessels. And studies of caffeine added to medicines cannot establish that a fast-food meal treats migraine, or that its salt and sugar “rebalance” the brain.

Caffeine also complicates the picture because suddenly stopping regular consumption can trigger headache. A small randomised trial involving ten people with migraine who regularly consumed substantial amounts of caffeine found that abrupt withdrawal triggered migraine attacks in several participants.

Cooling treatments have some supporting research. A systematic review found evidence of short-term pain relief from cooling interventions, although the six studies used different methods and the certainty of evidence varied. That offers some support for cooling as a comfort measure; it does not establish that holding a cold spoon against your forehead will relieve migraine.

Established treatments deserve attention, too. Triptans, such as sumatriptan, are medicines designed to treat migraine attacks. They act on receptors for serotonin, a chemical messenger involved in nerve signalling, and generally work best when taken early in the headache phase, while pain is still mild.

If attacks are frequent or disabling, discuss preventive treatment with a clinician. Options include medicines targeting CGRP, a chemical messenger involved in migraine.

Between attacks, a headache diary can help you and your clinician understand the pattern. Record symptoms and medication use, alongside possible influences such as changes in sleep and diet. Look for repeated associations before deciding that a particular food must go.

A sudden, extremely painful headache, new weakness, difficulty speaking or sudden loss of vision needs emergency assessment. Do not assume an unfamiliar symptom is migraine.

Understanding your own migraine patterns can help you recognise early warning signs and make informed decisions about care. It will not make every attack preventable, but it may help you act sooner when symptoms begin.

Strange Health is hosted by Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt. The executive producer is Gemma Ware, with video and sound editing for this episode by Anouk Millet. Artwork by Alice Mason.

If you’ve got a question about a viral trend or video you’ve seen and you’d like us to delve into the science behind it in a future episode, please email us at strangehealth@theconversation.com.

Listen to Strange Health via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Amanda Ellison, Professor of Neuroscience, Durham University

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

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men have a life expectancy of 71.9 years – 8.8 years less than non-Indigenous men.

Rates of potentially avoidable deaths in men under the age of 75 is almost three times higher for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men.

The reasons for these health disparities are complex. One is limited access to culturally appropriate health care, as well as language barriers, racism and discrimination when seeking care.

Our new paper outlines what’s needed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men to have more equitable access to primary care – the care people receive in their community before they need a hospital.

This goes beyond merely having Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander artwork in waiting rooms.

What does the evidence say?

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men are not simply “hard to reach”, nor are they uninterested in their health.

Our research has found Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men engage in health care when it is accessible, relevant and delivered in an environment where they feel culturally safe and respected.

The barriers are often much more practical and structural: long waiting times, difficulty getting appointments, lack of male health professionals, concerns about confidentiality, previous negative experiences, shame or embarrassment, culturally inappropriate environments and services that simply do not feel designed with men in mind.

Those barriers can look different for everyone.

A man in a remote community may face long distances to access health care and a shortage of health workers.

Someone in a regional town may have a doctor’s clinic nearby but not feel culturally safe using the service.

Another man may have previously had a poor experience with his local service and decides he will only return when he is really sick.

Just because a clinic is there, doesn’t necessarily mean people will use it.

What’s working well?

Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations are probably the clearest example of best practice service delivery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

They are governed by Aboriginal communities and provide holistic care combining health care with prevention, social support, cultural knowledge and community priorities.

As such, they can reduce barriers to access and deliver strong health outcomes.

We have also seen this with individual programs. The Enough Talk, Time for Action men’s health and wellbeing program created a men’s group in an Aboriginal primary health care service.

The program was built on existing relationships, culturally safe engagement and men’s own priorities as a pathway into health care. The program not only provided culturally safe health checks. It created an environment in which men wanted to engage.

Enough Talk, Time for Action also supported the establishment of a men’s group in the Daly River community of Nauiyu, where men requested a male-only pop-up clinic that came to them.

Coordinated with NT Health, a mobile clinic of male health staff now provides regular visits. This has been welcomed by local men who, as one Naiyu men’s group member told us, “have been asking for years for this”.

What makes these approaches work is community control, trusted relationships, cultural safety, flexibility and continuity of care.

What practical changes can all clinics make?

As we outline in our recent paper, every health clinic can take action to better engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men. They can:

• ask local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men what makes the service easy or difficult to use, and listen to what they want and need

• employ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers and, where possible, male staff

• provide genuine cultural safety training to ensure all staff, not just clinical staff, are trained to provide safe, appropriate and respectful care

• review the waiting room, appointment system and ensure patient confidentiality

• offer longer or more flexible appointments to make time for discussing complex or multiple health conditions

• build relationships with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and groups

• make annual health checks easy to access and invite men to participate

• have flexible hours and set up outreach clinics, where services come to community spaces

• measure success by whether men come back, build relationships and receive ongoing care – not simply by how many appointments are processed.

That means designing services for and with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men.

What practical changes can governments make?

Governments can:

• extend funding timeframes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men’s health programs from two to three years to at least five years. Short-term funding leads to staff turnover, disrupts relationships and forces organisations to spend enormous energy repeatedly applying for funds

• properly fund male health workforce positions

• strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community control in decision-making and governance

• undertake evaluations that measure health, wellbeing, engagement and learning, rather than simply counting activities.

Australia has spent decades asking what works. In many areas, we already know the answer. We need to embed what works into the health system rather than continually funding them as exceptions and add-ons.

Thanks to Celina Gaweda (JCU) and James Smith (Flinders University) for their co-authorship of the research on which this article is based.

Karla Canuto, Professor, Indigenous Health Promotion, James Cook University and Kootsy Canuto, Associate Professor, Indigenous Men's Health Promotion, James Cook University

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

As the nation ages, and children make up a smaller proportion of the population, the country is confronted with one of its biggest policy and economic challenges: how do we care for the elderly?

Despite increased focus on the quality and funding of residential aged care in recent years, there’s been insufficient discussion about how we address this complicated problem.

That’s likely because there are no easy solutions. It’s not something a single election cycle, or even a single government, can alleviate overnight.

But we can unpack how we got to this point, what it means for Australia and what might help.

From birth to death, we all need to be cared for, but as years of headlines have shown, Australia’s care economy faces big challenges. In this four-part series, experts examine how the country’s increasingly for-profit models of care and the government policy that spurred them on are failing those they’re supposed to protect – and what can be done about it.

A national success story

Technological advancements and increased gender equality have contributed to increased longevity and improvements in reproductive health access. Our social success has led to demographic consequences.

Australians are living longer and not replacing themselves, leading to an ageing population.

People aged 65 and over now comprise 18% of the Australian population, making the nation’s population aged and on its way to super aged.

Super aged, declining fertility

Forty-five years ago, older people represented 10% of the Australian population. The pace of ageing has accelerated faster than expected. It is also expected to continue at speed.

Ageing isn’t new for Australia and has been discussed as early as the 1930s. This was when the proportion of the population aged 65+ first reached the 7% threshold for an ageing population and declining birth rates were seen as a threat to national security.

Australians can expect to live 81.1 years (men) and 85.1 years (women), an increase of nearly ten years for men and seven years for women over the 45 years since 1981.

Australians tend to lead healthier lives than ever before too, particularly into older ages.

Growth among people aged 85+ is the greatest.

Total fertility rates (TFR) – the average number of births per woman – have declined steadily since the post-war baby boom peak of 3.55 births in 1961.

TFR has been below the 2.1 threshold for replacement since the mid 1970s, now at its lowest level of 1.48 births per woman.

Australians are increasingly not achieving their much-wanted families due to socioeconomic hurdles, including housing affordability, economic security, gender equality and climate change.

Australia risks irreversibly low fertility rates that may never recover, making population decline a real prospect in the not too distant future.

Shrinking working-age population

An ageing population presents serious economic issues due to changes in the working-age population.

For the first time in Australia’s history, people aged 65 and over outnumber children (those under 15 years). The nation has passed the maximum number of children it will ever see and the working-age population is declining.

Workers fuel government accounts

Fewer people of working age means fewer people paying taxes.

Individual income tax is the biggest contributor to government finances in Australia. Fewer individual taxpayers relative to those needing government support and services means spreading the national accounts thinner across more budget items.

Living standards risk going backwards as conflict emerges over what is funded in the national budget.

Women’s labour force participation has often been touted as a way to increase productivity and as means to help balance adverse economic consequences of an ageing population.

But with women still doing the vast majority of unpaid care work, and with more people needing that care, the future looks challenging.

Letting older people down

Older Australians contribute to care through caring for elderly parents and partners, grandparenting of young children, and volunteering. Ageing yields dividends for the caring side of the unpaid care economy.

Yet older Australians are slipping through the cracks. More than 3,600 elderly people are stuck in hospitals across Australia due to bed block in aged care facilities.

Nearly 6% of Australians report needing help with everyday activities, with most aged 65 and over.

Older Australians are expected to self-fund retirements through superannuation in increasing numbers, taking pressure off age pension costs.

The aged-care workforce in Australia is nearly 500,000 strong, and expected to increase. Many of the aged-care workers in Australia are migrants and women.

Volunteering in aged care is also promoted by the Australian government as an essential element of the workforce.

Caring disproportionately falls to women in informal care arrangements. Australian mothers are sandwiched in the caring stack of paid work, care for children, and caring for the elderly.

Fewer offspring means more formal care for the elderly. While globally there have been innovations in in-home aged care, Australia has been slow to such government-supported progress.

What might help?

The Australian government is confident artificial intelligence (AI) will aid productivity in an ageing population. But AI cannot care for the elderly.

While robotic exoskeletons and robot carers have been proposed for aged care, nothing replaces human caring.

Migration and women are increasingly being relied on to help meet the needs of an ageing population. Without serious structural reform, population pressures will place unreasonable burdens on mothers and families. Burdening mothers and families adds to already high strain, constraining family formation and childbearing even further.

Taxation changes could be one way to help balance declining workers and increasing pressures on government spending. Increasing business tax might be one part of the solution to help care for Australia’s elderly.

But broadly speaking, policymakers need to put a lot more thought into how to help address this problem. Too many are already shouldering too much, or are being left behind, and time will only compound it.

We will all be older and in need of care at some point. What future do we want?

Liz Allen, Demographer, POLIS Centre for Social Policy Research, Australian National University

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

Feelings matter. That’s why for over 25 years, the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index has asked Australian adults how satisfied they feel about their lives and life in Australia. It’s a simple but powerful way to understand how we are faring as a country.

This year’s index tracked Australians’ wellbeing in a challenging year at home and abroad. We also set out to understand how Australians see life playing out for future generations.

More than 10,000 Australians took part in the survey in April and May, just before the federal budget. In September, we went back to almost 1,500 of the same people to see what had changed.

How Australians feel about personal wellbeing in 2026

Compared with 2025, personal wellbeing held steady.

In April–May, the average score on the Personal Wellbeing Index was 67.2 out of 100. This assesses satisfaction across seven areas of personal life:

• standard of living
• health
• achieving in life
• relationships
• safety
• community connectedness, and
• future security.

By September, however, the index had slipped 1.1 points.

Satisfaction with personal safety and future security, which had already dropped in April-May, fell further. Satisfaction with standard of living also declined.

The survey moved from phone to online in 2024. Online scores tend to be lower because people answer differently in private than when speaking to an interviewer. Trends are best read within each survey method.

Feelings about national wellbeing took a hit

We also surveyed people about their feelings about life in Australia more generally, via a different measure we call the National Wellbeing Index. This assesses satisfaction across six areas:

• the economic situation
• state of the natural environment
• social conditions
• government
• business, and
• national security.

Compared to personal wellbeing, Australians’ feelings about national wellbeing took a bigger hit. In April-May, the National Wellbeing Index fell 3.2 points from 2025 to 54.8 out of 100.

Last year’s survey saw a rise in national wellbeing. This was driven mainly by higher satisfaction with the economy and the government.

This year, however, those were the areas that dropped most, and they hadn’t recovered by September.

Averages can hide who is doing it toughest

Australians experiencing unemployment or those on low incomes reported some of the lowest wellbeing of any population groups.

This gap isn’t new. The index has documented it for over 25 years, and it has only meaningfully narrowed once: during the pandemic, when income support payments were doubled.

Young adults are also struggling. We also found that

• 56.1% of 18- to 24-year-olds reported high or very high psychological distress
• 45.7% felt lonely at least some of the time.

How will future Australians fare?

This year we also asked Australians to look ahead.

We asked about five societal challenges that closely map to the transitions identified in the government’s latest Intergenerational Report:

• housing costs
• artificial intelligence
• access to healthcare
• climate change, and
• global political instability.

People saw every challenge as hitting future generations harder than themselves.

Housing stood out, with more than four in five (83.4%) believing housing costs would have a high negative impact on future generations.

Younger Australians expect to feel it, too: seven in ten of those aged 18 to 34 expected housing costs to negatively affect their own lives.

The May federal budget included reforms aimed at intergenerational equity, particularly by addressing housing costs and availability.

But when we asked again in September, views on housing hadn’t shifted.

What did shift was the share of people expecting AI to negatively impact their lives. This rose 9.3 percentage points in four months, and by 15.1 points among people aged 65 and over.

A vision for the future

We also asked Australians to tell us, in their own words, what kind of Australia they want for future generations.

Across almost 10,000 responses, a broadly shared vision emerged. Australians want a country that is safe and socially connected, environmentally sustainable, fair, affordable and economically secure.

Almost six in ten (58.1%) wrote about at least one of four themes:

• safety
• environmental and climate action
• improved cost of living and financial security, or
• a strong economy.

That share held steady regardless of age, income, gender, location, education or language spoken at home. It is a genuine reminder that there is more connection between us than disconnection.

Australians also feel this future is partly theirs to shape; almost two in three (62.7%) said they feel responsible for the wellbeing of future generations.

That’s a striking result in these challenging times when, as Treasurer Jim Chalmers recently put it, Australians face a test of whether we “turn on each other” or “change and adapt and reform and prosper together through all of this uncertainty”.

But that responsibility doesn’t sit with individuals alone. The challenge for policymakers, communities, and institutions is to match Australians’ forward-looking outlook with legislated mechanisms to turn this much needed long-term thinking into reality.

The federal government’s Measuring What Matters framework already tracks much of what Australians described to us, from safety and sustainability to financial security and a strong economy.

But measuring wellbeing isn’t the same as acting on it, and there’s currently no mechanism to ensure the framework is used in decision-making.

Australians have been clear about the country they want to hand on. Now we need to make sure the decisions that shape it are measured against that vision.

Georgie Frykberg, Project Manager, School of Psychology, Deakin University and Kate Lycett, Senior Research Fellow, School of Psychology, Deakin University

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

Navigation apps such as Waze, Google Maps and Apple Maps offer drivers many useful functions, but one of them is sometimes controversial: advance notice of police or speed cameras ahead.

In new research, my colleagues and I ran experiments to see how these alerts affect driver behaviour in the real world.

We found drivers slow down when they get a warning, which came as no surprise. But the more worrying part is what drivers do when the app stays quiet.

Who gives speed camera warnings – and who sees them

Drivers warning each other about police ahead is nothing new. Whether it’s truck drivers putting out a radio call or car drivers flashing their headlights, giving other drivers a heads up about police presence is often seen as a courtesy.

Today, the warning comes from your phone. Waze, a Google-owned navigation app with more than 150 million monthly users, lets drivers report police and speed cameras with a tap, warning other users nearby. Google Maps and Apple Maps do the same.

A 2020 study found up to one in three Australian drivers used these apps while driving, and this number has likely increased since.

What we discovered

We wanted to know how drivers respond to these alerts in the real world. So we parked an unmarked car at 33 roadside sites across southeastern Queensland and measured passing car speed with a handheld laser device, the same type used by Queensland Police.

After we set up, drivers reported us to the Waze platform as police enforcement in an average time of about 14 minutes. We didn’t check Google Maps or Apple Maps.

We then kept measuring for the same amount of time again. Across more than 9,000 vehicles, the change was stark.

Before the alert appeared, 55% of drivers were speeding. Afterwards, 26% were.

The biggest drop was in 100km/h zones, from 64% of drivers speeding to 12%. We couldn’t see inside passing cars, so we can’t confirm every driver who slowed down had seen the alert. But the alert was the only external change we observed, and the drop appeared consistently at all 33 sites.

This suggests drivers were slowing down because of the app alert, not simply to observe the speed limit.

Even in active school zones, almost two thirds of drivers were over the 40km/h limit before an alert appeared. Even after the warning, more than a third were still speeding.

How speed cameras make drivers slow down – or not

Road policing is built on the idea of deterrence. People are less likely to break a rule if they think they may be caught and punished. Research shows that having a greater certainty of being caught matters more to the deterrent effect than the size of a fine or other punishment.

So speed enforcement works best when drivers feel a camera could be anywhere, at any time. Apps like Waze turn this on its head, so speed checks start to feel like a predictable risk that is easy to dodge.

Every time a driver gets an alert, slows down, passes police, then speeds back up, they learn they can speed and get away with it. Criminologists call this “punishment avoidance”.

People who get away with breaking the rules come to believe they are less likely to be caught next time, so they offend more often. In effect, drivers learn that the alert means “slow down” – but when there is no alert, they have the all-clear to speed.

Drivers who use apps that reveal police locations have described feeling “slightly more invincible”, and they report speeding more often.

In one recent survey of Queensland drivers, more than three in four admitted to speeding, and almost half didn’t expect to get caught.

Why it matters

Driving a few kilometres per hour over the limit may seem harmless. However, even small increases in speed raise the risk of being involved in a crash, as well as making crashes more severe.

Speeding is one of the most common factors in fatal crashes in Queensland, playing a role in approximately one in three of these incidents.

Navigation apps can tell you where police have been reported, but they can’t warn you about a child stepping out between parked cars, or from behind a school bus. The lack of an enforcement alert doesn’t mean it is safe to speed on the road ahead.

What now?

We shared our findings with highway patrol officers. Rather than taking the results as a defeat, they saw them as an opportunity to change how they operate.

Alerts appear quickly and linger, so officers could treat one as a signal to move on and start again with drivers who haven’t been warned. A single speed camera crew that moves often could show up on the app in several places, spreading the sense of risk across a wider area without extra resources.

Our research does not suggest these apps or their alert features should be banned, in the way that radar detectors already are.

Instead, we see it as a catalyst to rethink how road policing works in a connected world – and a reminder to drivers to drive to the speed limit and the local conditions, not what’s on their phone.

Levi Anderson, Research Associate, Road Safety, University of the Sunshine Coast

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