Why are dead and dying seabirds washing up on our beaches in their hundreds?

In October and November, horrified beachgoers often find dead and dying muttonbirds washing up in an event called a seabird “wreck”.

Again this year, there are reports of Australia’s beautiful east coast beaches turned grim with hundreds of dying seabirds.

Here’s what we do and don’t know about seabird wrecks, and what you can do if you come across one.

Wrecks Are Becoming More Common

Millions of short-tailed shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostis), commonly known as muttonbirds, return to southern Australia from the Arctic each spring – a round trip of up to 35,000km.

Not all birds survive their long migration. The fit and healthy largely return in late September and October. The less fit lag behind. To some extent, deaths are natural.

Muttonbirds keep a strict timetable and, while failed migrants can wash up any time during spring, mass mortalities can occur from mid-October to November. Muttonbird wrecks have happened on rare occasions since time immemorial, but are becoming more common.

The many ideas about what is causing wrecks range from storms and overfishing to plastic, blue-green algae and irradiated water from Fukushima.

University of Tasmania researchers have studied the muttonbirds for decades. While we can’t pinpoint the exact cause for every wreck, we can explain what we know and eliminate the unlikely culprits.

What We Know

When muttonbird wrecks occur, the casualties are starving. These birds weigh only half their healthy body weight. The factors leading to this starvation start before they reach Australia.

Muttonbirds chase an eternal summer. After returning to Australia from the North Pacific, they lay eggs in late November on Australia’s southern islands and raise a single chick. When the weather cools in April the adults depart on a great migration north where the sea ice is melting on the Bering Sea ahead of an Arctic summer.

Ecosystem changes in the sub-Arctic, where the birds fatten up over the northern summer, can lead to death on Australian beaches.

Many marine animals share the North Pacific Ocean with muttonbirds. Among them are several salmon species, which compete with muttonbirds and other marine wildlife for the same zooplankton prey – the abundant small animals floating in the surface waters of the ocean.

The pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), in particular, is central to the muttonbirds story. You may have seen them in documentaries, being eaten by bears on the annual “salmon run”. You may also eat them yourself, as tinned salmon.

Pink salmon live hard and fast. Their life cycle from hatching to spawning lasts two years. However, wild numbers couldn’t satisfy consumer demand and by the mid-20th century the species was in trouble.

To take pressure off wild fish stock and meet soaring demand, salmon hatcheries now release billions of fry, many more than would exist through nature, into the North Pacific Ocean. Pink salmon numbers, both hatchery and wild fish, have more than doubled in recent decades.

Increased salmon numbers have caused crashes in zooplankton in odd-numbered years, when most pink salmon reach spawning size and are 25 times more abundant than in even-numbered years. The effect is so strong that even healthy breeding muttonbirds arriving in Tasmania are lighter most odd-numbered years.

Other factors are also affecting zooplankton. The Arctic seas are among the fastest warming on Earth. Marine heatwaves have been causing shifts in where and when zooplankton occur, and how large they grow.

When seabirds on a strict schedule arrive to feed, they can miss the zooplankton buffet. This has led to devastating wrecks for Arctic and sub-Arctic seabird species, including muttonbirds.

In 2013, millions of muttonbirds starved along Australia’s coast from K'gari/Fraser Island to Tasmania. Though we don’t know the exact cause, this was likely influenced by a double whammy: competition for food with salmon and a severe marine heatwave called “the blob”.

But what about the other causes? Examination of wrecked birds rules out plastic, blue-green algae and irradiated water from Fukushima as causes of death.

Birds are already in poor condition when they arrive. Storms or strong winds might push an already poorly muttonbird over the edge, but are generally not the cause of its poor condition. People often find muttonbirds after storms because onshore winds blow them from the sea onto beaches.

What Should I Do If I Find A Muttonbird?

If a muttonbird is too weak to fly, sadly it’s unlikely to recover.

If you want to give them a chance, though the odds are low, contact a specialist seabird rescue group. Seabirds have very specific care needs. Taking one home or feeding it, while well intended, may cause more harm than good.

If you find more than a few along the beach, you can report the wreck by emailing the author or contacting the University of Tasmania. Note the time, date, location and number of birds per kilometre.

If you find a muttonbird (or any bird) with a metal ring on its leg, please report the number to the Australian Bird and Bat Banding Scheme.

What If I Find Other Dead Seabirds Or Waterbirds?

There’s another reason to watch out for unusual bird deaths this summer. A deadly bird disease has a high probability of reaching Australia’s shores. High pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) has killed millions of birds worldwide, including seabirds.

The disease could enter Australia if carried by birds, including muttonbirds, migrating from the Northern Hemisphere (where HPIA is infecting wild bird populations) to Australia.

If you find an unusual number of sick or dying seabirds, shorebirds or waterbirds, report the incident to Wildlife Health Australia.

Lauren Roman, ARC DECRA Fellow, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

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

A monster eddy current is spinning into existence off the coast of Sydney. Will it bring a new marine heatwave?

Right now, there’s something big spinning off the coast from Sydney – a giant rotating vortex of sea water, powerful enough to dominate the ocean currents off south-eastern Australia.

Oceanographers describe these spinning water bodies as “eddies” – but they’re not the small eddy currents you see in creeks or rivers. Ocean eddies are enormous. They’re usually hundreds of kilometres across (100–300km), up to 2km deep and can be visible from space.

It turns out these eddies drive change underwater by spawning marine heatwaves. Our new research demonstrates the link between a warm ocean eddy and a record-breaking marine heatwave which struck off Sydney from December 2021 to February 2022.

Now it’s happening again. An even bigger eddy is forming about 50km off Sydney. We have just returned from a 24-day research voyage on CSIRO’s research vessel RV Investigator to explore this monster eddy.

Our estimates suggest this 400km wide beast holds 30% more heat than normal for this part of the ocean. Its currents are spinning at 8km per hour. And the temperatures deep underwater are up to 3°C above normal. If it moves close to shore, it could trigger another coastal marine heatwave.

How Can An Eddy Current Make A Heatwave?

Eddies are the ocean equivalent of storms in the atmosphere. Like weather patterns, they can be warm or cold. But ocean eddies can shape the ocean’s patterns of life.

Warm eddies are like ocean deserts with little life, while cold eddies are typically much more productive. That’s because they draw up nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous from the deep sea, which become food for plankton.

Just as storms can in the atmosphere, ocean eddies can drive extreme “ocean weather”. That’s because warm eddies can bring in masses of warm water and keep it there for months. Sea life is often very finely attuned to temperature, so a sudden heatwave like this can heavily impact ecosystems.

It’s important to better understand how eddy currents grow, move and decay better. That’s because they can store large amounts of heat and can temporarily increase coastal sea levels.

What we do know is that warm eddies along Australia’s east coast can be fed by the East Australian Current when it becomes unstable. The current wobbles back and forth until eventually the wobbles form a coherent circle – an eddy – or adding to an existing one. It’s like a garden hose thrashing around on the grass when the flow is too great. These unstable currents can be small, on the kilometre scale, or huge.

Our research pinpointed the root cause of the 2021 marine heatwave off Sydney. A large warm eddy formed. But it couldn’t spiral away into deeper waters, because there were cold eddies to the north and south preventing it. That’s very similar to what can happen in the atmosphere, where a high pressure system can be held in place by other weather systems.

Now, it looks as if history is repeating.

Over the past month, an enormous eddy – fully 400km wide and 3km deep – has been spinning up just off southeastern Australia. It’s being fed by the warm East Australian Current, which brings warm water from the tropics down to more temperate waters. This eddy is bigger and warmer than most eddies in the region, especially at this time of year. It has been growing over the past month, and is pushing up against cold waters to the south. Where the two systems meet there are very strong temperature differences – up to 5°C over just 4km.

You can get some insight into how eddy currents behave from satellites.

Our trip on the research vessel RV Investigator made it possible for us to grasp how this powerful current was behaving – in three dimensions.

We also released drifters, GPS-tracked buoys which float around the eddy centre in a massive circle. Some have been carried more than 2,000km in the last month, passing where they originally started. Others have escaped the eddy and headed east into the Pacific.

These sensors and instruments have given us vital information. Now we know the water in the eddy is flowing at a fast walking pace, around 8km per hour. And we know that while the currents within the eddy are rotating quickly, the eddy itself has remained fairly stationary off the NSW coast, growing with warm waters from further north.

We also deployed five diving Argo floats. Satellite data shows us surface temperatures in the eddy have hit 23°C, two degrees above average for a month. But Argo floats show us the temperatures are even more extreme 500m below the surface, more than 3°C above average.

What happens to eddies? Like atmospheric systems, these are effectively heat engines. They transport heat to new areas as they whirl in the ocean. While they hold heat a long time, eventually it’s lost to the atmosphere and through mixing at the edges of the current. Eventually, they disappear.

But as we head into summer, the mega eddy is unlikely to go anywhere. If it moves towards the coast, where marine life is concentrated, we will see water temperatures spike – and possibly, underwater disaster for many species.

We would like to thank the RV Investigator’s Master, Captain Andrew Roebuck, Deck Officers and crew and the CSIRO technical staff.

Moninya Roughan, Professor in Oceanography, UNSW Sydney; Amandine Schaeffer, Senior lecturer, UNSW Sydney; Junde Li, Postdoctoral research associate, and Shane Keating, Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney

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

26 years ago, Howard chose fossil fuels over the Pacific. What will Albanese choose?

Hot on the heels of trips to Washington and Beijing, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is now in the Cook Islands for the Pacific Island Forum. There, he will aim to strengthen relations with Pacific countries and reaffirm Australia’s place as a security partner of choice.

But to do that, he’ll have to repair a historic split from when former prime minister John Howard met with Pacific leaders on the same island, Aitutaki, a quarter of a century ago to defend his choice to expand Australia’s fossil fuel industries.

Pacific leaders see climate change as by far their greatest security threat. Sea level rise, stronger cyclones, marine heatwaves and ocean acidification pose existential threats. They will ask Albanese to support a regional declaration for a phaseout of fossil fuels.

What will happen on the atoll? We could see history repeat – Pacific outrage, Australian intransigence. Or we could see a better outcome, if Albanese signals Australia is at last ready to move away from fossil fuels.

A Split In Aitutaki

When a scientific consensus on global warming emerged in the mid-1980s, Australia’s initial response was aligned with Pacific nations. In fact, they called for industrialised countries to immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions in a joint statement in 1990.

Pacific island nations suggested Australia’s national target – to cut emissions by 20% by 2005 – should be binding for all developed countries.

That brief window soon closed. Under sustained lobbying from the fossil fuel industry, the Australian government came to see global climate action as a threat to economic prosperity.

At the first Conference of Parties (COP1) to the UN climate convention in 1995, Australia’s negotiators argued for a weaker emissions target because our economy was more fossil fuel dependent than comparable nations. This positioning in the UN climate talks was further entrenched when Howard came to power in 1996.

Differences with island nations came to a head at the 1997 South Pacific Forum, when island leaders tried to persuade Howard to support their calls for globally binding emissions cuts ahead of Kyoto Protocol negotiations later that year. Discussions in Aitutaki turned bitter and ran into overtime in the airport lounge.

Howard was not moved. At the Kyoto negotiations, Australia sought and won its own clause, allowing it to actually increase emissions, and expand its fossil fuel industries.

Afterwards, the Cook Islands prime minister Geoffrey Henry described Australia’s approach as a “self-serving” attempt to protect coal and energy intensive industries. Tuvalu prime minister Bikenibau Paeniu told regional media that “Australia dominates us so much in this region, for once we would have liked to have got some respect”.

For his part, Howard dismissed concerns that climate change and sea-level rise could threaten island states as “exaggerated” and “apocalyptic”.

Australia’s decision has rankled ever since.

Could We See Australia Repair The Rift?

For his part, Albanese has said he wants to repair the climate rift. At last year’s forum, he joined island leaders to declare a Pacific climate emergency. Australia is bidding to host the UN climate talks in 2026 in partnership with Pacific island countries, a move island leaders have formally welcomed. But it’s also clear Pacific countries want him to support a regional declaration to phase out fossil fuels.

Pacific governments have not been sitting still. This year, a group of Pacific governments called for a fossil-fuel-free Pacific. Island countries want to establish a new Pacific Energy Commissioner to oversee the region’s energy transition.

Pacific countries are also campaigning for a global Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty which would oversee the end of fossil fuel expansion. These goals will be put to leaders again this week – including Albanese.

There are signs Albanese will arrive with new climate finance in hand, including A$50 million for the global Green Climate Fund and funds for a regional Pacific Resilience Facility. Support to tackle rising climate adaptation costs will be welcomed, but it won’t be enough for Pacific leaders. What they want to see is their regionally powerful neighbour actually stop adding fuel to the fire.

Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu says Pacific nations need genuine allies who will make substantive commitments to move away from coal, oil and gas.

No Stopping The Global Energy Transition

It’s not just Pacific nations calling on Australia to commit to a fossil fuel phase-out. Germany’s international climate envoy Jennifer Morgan is headed to this week’s forum to call on Australia to support the European Union push for a phase-out at next month’s UN COP28 climate talks in Dubai.

Ambassador Morgan this week said:

we have to not only phase out fossil fuels, we need to stop building new infrastructure for fossil fuels, because they will become stranded assets. We need to be working on a just transition for workers and building up new industries.

She has a point. The International Energy Agency last week released its annual World Energy Outlook, which found global deployment of renewable energy technologies is rapidly overtaking fossil fuel projects, and demand for fossil fuels is likely to peak before 2030.

Australia’s economic interests are shifting as the world economy heads toward net zero emissions. Gas and coal aren’t the only valuable things underneath Australian dirt – we’ve got a wealth of critical minerals vital to the clean energy transition.

Governments have no choice but to plan for the inevitable decline of fossil fuels and smooth the transition to clean energy industries such as battery manufacturing and green hydrogen and ammonia.

The sooner Australia gets on with the transition away from fossil fuels, the sooner we will be embraced by the rest of the Pacific family. 

Wesley Morgan, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

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

Luminous ‘mother-of-pearl’ clouds explain why climate models miss so much Arctic and Antarctic warming

Our planet has warmed by about 1.2°C since 1850. But this warming is not uniform. Warming at the poles, especially the Arctic, has been three to four times faster than the rest of the globe. It’s a phenomenon known as “polar amplification”.

Climate models simulate this effect, but when tested against the past 40 years of warming, these models fall short. The situation is even worse when it comes to modelling past climates with very high levels of greenhouse gases.

This is a problem because these are the same models used to project into the future and forecast how the climate will change. They are likely to underestimate what will happen later this century, including risks such as ice sheet melting or permafrost thawing.

In our new research published today in Nature Geoscience we used a high-resolution model of the atmosphere that includes the stratosphere. We found a special type of cloud appears over polar regions when greenhouse gas concentrations are very high. The role of this type of cloud has been overlooked so far. This is one of the reasons why our models are too cold at the poles.

Back To The Future

Looking into past climates can give us glimpses of possible futures for a range of extreme conditions. For us, this means we can use Earth’s history to find out how well our climate models perform. We can test our models by simulating episodes in the past when Earth was much warmer. The advantage of this is that we have temperature reconstructions for these episodes to evaluate the models, as opposed to the future, for which measurements are not available.

If we go back 50 million years or so, our planet was very hot. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations ranged between 900 and 1,900 parts per million (ppm), compared with 415 ppm today. Methane (CH₄) concentrations were likely also much higher.

Canada’s arctic archipelago was covered in lush rainforests inhabited by alligators, turtles, lizards and mammals.

For these plants and animals to survive, conditions must have been warm and ice-free year-round. Indeed, surface ocean temperatures exceeded 20°C near the north pole (at about 87°N) and 25°C in the Southern Ocean (at about 67°S).

This period called the early Eocene is a perfect test bed for our models, because it was globally very warm, and the poles were even warmer, meaning it was a climate with extreme polar amplification. In addition, the Eocene is recent enough for temperature reconstructions to be available.

But as it turns out, the models fail again. They are much too cold at high latitudes. What are our models missing?

Polar Stratospheric Clouds

In 1992 American paleoclimatologist Lisa Sloan suggested polar stratospheric clouds might have caused extreme warming at high latitudes in the past.

These clouds are a rare and beautiful sight today. They are also called nacreous or mother-of-pearl clouds for their vivid and sometimes luminous colours.

They form at very high altitudes (in the stratosphere) and at very low temperatures (over the poles). In the present day climate, they appear mainly over Antarctica, but have also been observed during winter months over Scotland, Scandinavia and Alaska, at times when the stratosphere was particularly cold.

Just like greenhouse gases, they absorb infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface and re-emit a portion of this energy back to the surface. This suggests polar stratospheric clouds could be one of the missing puzzle pieces.

They warm the surface. And their effect could be significant, especially in winter, when the sun does not rise. But they are difficult to simulate in a climate model, so most models ignore them. This omission could explain why climate models miss some of the polar warming, because they miss a process that warms the poles.

Three decades after Sloan’s paper, a few atmosphere models are finally complex enough to allow us to test her hypothesis. In our research we use one of them and find that under certain conditions, the additional warming due to these polar stratospheric clouds exceeds 7°C during the winter months. This significantly reduces the gap between climate models and temperature evidence from the early Eocene. Sloan was right.

Implications For Future Projections

Our research explains why climate models don’t work so well for past climates when greenhouse gas levels were much higher than they are today. But what about the future? Should we be concerned?

There is some good news. While polar stratospheric clouds do warm the poles, they won’t be as common in the future as they were in the distant past, even if both CO₂ and CH₄ reach very high levels.

This is due to another difference between the Eocene and today: the position of continents and mountains, which were different back then and which also influence the formation of polar stratospheric clouds. So even if we hit early Eocene levels of CH₄ and CO₂ in the future, we would expect less polar stratospheric cloud to be formed. This suggests the standard climate models are better at predicting the future than the past.

It’s therefore unlikely the Arctic and Antarctica will be covered by these beautiful clouds anytime soon. But our research shows evidence from past climates can reveal processes that only become important when greenhouse gas concentrations are high. Some of these processes are not included in our models because models are tested against present day observations and other processes simply seemed more important to include. Looking into the past is a way of broadening our horizon and learning for the future.

Katrin Meissner, Professor and Director of the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW, UNSW Sydney; Deepashree Dutta, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Cambridge, and Martin Jucker, Lecturer in Atmospheric Dynamics, UNSW Sydney

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

Extreme weather may help invasive species outcompete native animals – new study

Non-native species appear to be better able to resist extreme weather, threatening native plants and animals and potentially creating more favourable conditions for invasive species under climate change. That’s the conclusion of a new study in the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Wildfires, droughts, heavy rainfall and storms are all increasing, and predicted to become more frequent throughout the next century due to human-driven climate change.

At the same time, humans are transporting more species into new areas, despite concerted global efforts to increase biosecurity across borders and to target the eradication of specific species. Some of these non-native species can go on to become invasive, damaging native ecosystems.

Capitalising On Opportunities

Invasive species introduced by humans often possess traits that help them survive or even thrive when ecosystems are disturbed (perhaps by wildfire, a storm or human buildings).

Invasive plants are generally fast-growing, for instance, allowing them to quickly fill gaps before native species can recover from disturbances. They are also often very good at dispersing their seeds, allowing them to quickly colonise disturbed areas.

This is why scientists have long suspected that extreme weather and the success of non-native species could be linked.

If extreme weather removes native plants and animals, that increases the availability of resources such as water and space. Non-native species can then capitalise on these new resources to establish themselves.

Even more concerning is the potential for extreme weather and non-native species to interact, exacerbating their effect on native biodiversity. For instance, in a recent field experiment in the US, scientists deliberately started a fire which killed about 10% of the longleaf pine trees in the area studied.

But in areas where an invasive grass – cogongrass, an Asian native – was allowed to establish itself alongside the pines, the fires had more fuel and were larger, hotter and burned for longer.

Where the scientists had added rain shelters to simulate drought conditions, the grass dried out further and the fires became much more lethal. A combination of drought and the invasive species meant longleaf pine mortality soared to 44%.

Similarly, on the small Macquarie Island in the south west Pacific, a combination of extreme rainfall and the presence of invasive European rabbits reduced the breeding success of nesting black-browed albatrosses. Heavy grazing by the invasive rabbits reduced plant cover, exposing the albatross chicks to the harsh weather conditions.

This relationship between extreme weather and invasive species – two human-driven drivers of global change – threatens native plants and animals and could cost countries billions of dollars in coming decades. Ecologists must identify priority areas and species that can be targeted in efforts to minimise costs and prevent the loss of native biodiversity.

Bad Weather, Good For Non-Natives

To better understand how native and non-native species respond to extreme weather events, the scientists behind the new study reanalysed information from 443 peer-reviewed studies on how species responded to wildfires, droughts and storms. In all, they gathered data on 187 non-native species and 1,852 native species from all major animal groups.

Their results suggest that native and non-native species may indeed respond differently to extreme weather. Across all studies, a total of 24.8% of non-native species benefited from extreme weather events compared to only 12.7% of native species.

For example, while native species in both freshwater and land-based ecosystems were harmed by droughts, their non-native counterparts showed no significant response. Notably, marine ecosystems were comparatively more resistant to extreme weather events, with fewer differences between native and non-native species.

The authors did find marine heatwaves harmed native coral species, however, a relationship that has been documented in other scientific studies.

Identifying Global Hotspots

The authors took this information and combined it with known global hotspots of extreme weather, to identify areas where native species may be particularly vulnerable to the combination of extreme weather and invasive species.

They found high latitude areas such as northern US and Europe, for instance, are both vulnerable to extreme cold spells and possess non-native species that benefit from cold spells. Alternatively, areas of the western Amazon in Brazil and east Asia were identified as vulnerable to flooding and possessing flood-resistant non-native species.

In these regions, non-native species could benefit from increasing cold spells or flooding respectively, posing a greater threat to native plants and animals.

Studies like this are very useful. Regions that are identified as vulnerable can be targeted with early preventative measures to stop the spread of invasive species, or with measures to help native biodiversity cope with climate change.

This research could also allow targeted restoration to remove non-native species and produce invasion-resistant native communities that could better withstand future conditions. This is what happened on Macquarie Island, where invasive rabbits and rats were eventually eliminated and the whole ecosystem soon bounced back.

Such action could be critical as we adapt to a changing climate and a greater mixing of the world’s plants and animals.

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Harry Shepherd, Postdoctoral Research Associate, King's College London

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

How global warming shakes the Earth: Seismic data show ocean waves gaining strength as the planet warms

As oceans waves rise and fall, they apply forces to the sea floor below and generate seismic waves. These seismic waves are so powerful and widespread that they show up as a steady thrum on seismographs, the same instruments used to monitor and study earthquakes.

That wave signal has been getting more intense in recent decades, reflecting increasingly stormy seas and higher ocean swell.

In a new study in the journal Nature Communications, colleagues and I tracked that increase around the world over the past four decades. These global data, along with other ocean, satellite and regional seismic studies, show a decadeslong increase in wave energy that coincides with increasing storminess attributed to rising global temperatures.

What Seismology Has To Do With Ocean Waves

Global seismographic networks are best known for monitoring and studying earthquakes and for allowing scientists to create images of the planet’s deep interior.

These highly sensitive instruments continuously record an enormous variety of natural and human-caused seismic phenomena, including volcanic eruptions, nuclear and other explosions, meteor strikes, landslides and glacier-quakes. They also capture persistent seismic signals from wind, water and human activity. For example, seismographic networks observed the global quieting in human-caused seismic noise as lockdown measures were instituted around the world during the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the most globally pervasive of seismic background signals is the incessant thrum created by storm-driven ocean waves referred to as the global microseism.

Two Types Of Seismic Signals

Ocean waves generate microseismic signals in two different ways.

The most energetic of the two, known as the secondary microseism, throbs at a period between about eight and 14 seconds. As sets of waves travel across the oceans in various directions, they interfere with one another, creating pressure variation on the sea floor. However, interfering waves aren’t always present, so in this sense, it is an imperfect proxy for overall ocean wave activity.

A second way in which ocean waves generate global seismic signals is called the primary microseism process. These signals are caused by traveling ocean waves directly pushing and pulling on the seafloor. Since water motions within waves fall off rapidly with depth, this occurs in regions where water depths are less than about 1,000 feet (about 300 meters). The primary microseism signal is visible in seismic data as a steady hum with a period between 14 and 20 seconds.

What The Shaking Planet Tells Us

In our study, we estimated and analyzed historical primary microseism intensity back to the late 1980s at 52 seismograph sites around the world with long histories of continuous recording.

We found that 41 (79%) of these stations showed highly significant and progressive increases in energy over the decades.

The results indicate that globally averaged ocean wave energy since the late 20th century has increased at a median rate of 0.27% per year. However, since 2000, that globally averaged increase in the rate has risen by 0.35% per year.

We found the greatest overall microseism energy in the very stormy Southern Ocean regions near the Antarctica peninsula. But these results show that North Atlantic waves have intensified the fastest in recent decades compared to historical levels. That is consistent with recent research suggesting North Atlantic storm intensity and coastal hazards are increasing. Storm Ciarán, which hit Europe with powerful waves and hurricane-force winds in November 2023, was one record-breaking example.

The decadeslong microseism record also shows the seasonal swing of strong winter storms between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It captures the wave-dampening effects of growing and shrinking Antarctic sea ice, as well as the multi-year highs and lows associated with El Niño and La Niña cycles and their long-range effects on ocean waves and storms.

Together, these and other recent seismic studies complement the results from climate and ocean research showing that storms, and waves, are intensifying as the climate warms.

A Coastal Warning

The oceans have absorbed about 90% of the excess heat connected to rising greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in recent decades. That excess energy can translate into more damaging waves and more powerful storms.

Our results offer another warning for coastal communities, where increasing ocean wave heights can pound coastlines, damaging infrastructure and eroding the land. The impacts of increasing wave energy are further compounded by ongoing sea level rise fueled by climate change and by subsidence. And they emphasize the importance of mitigating climate change and building resilience into coastal infrastructure and environmental protection strategies.

Richard Aster, Professor of Geophysics and Department Head, Colorado State University

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

Making money green: Australia takes its first steps towards a net zero finance strategy

This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.

Just north of Jamestown in South Australia, 70 kilometres east of the Spencer Gulf and next to a wind farm of nearly 100 turbines, stands the world’s first big battery.

Built in partnership with Tesla and financed and operated by Neoen, a French multinational renewable energy developer, the Hornsdale Power Reserve and other big battery projects could stimulate a homegrown battery industry, contributing many billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the Australian economy. But for that industry to rise, it will need money.

Australia aspires not only to transition its economy to net zero emissions, but to become a green energy superpower. That means building a host of solar and wind farms, batteries, electric vehicle charging stations, upgrades to the grid and to all kinds of buildings, as well as investments in new technology.

These investments and big infrastructure projects don’t come cheap. Getting to net zero emissions by 2050 requires investment in renewable energy of A$754 billion in power generation alone, according to research by the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures and funded by Future Super.

The Size Of The Green Finance Challenge

By 2030, the world will have to invest an estimated US$4.3 trillion a year – roughly the GDP of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy – in climate finance. These financial flows need to grow by 21% a year, on average. Without this enormous increase, the economic transition will not happen in time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

The scale of financing means that superannuation funds and other big institutional investors must be involved. They need to know where their money is going, and whether investments are genuine or a case of “greenwashing”. They need certainty that companies in which they invest have solid plans to reduce their climate risk, and the ability to ask the companies questions when they don’t.

But current financial regulation is not set up to support such best practice. To give just one example, default superannuation funds lack the benchmarks – measures of performance assessed by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority – they need to invest in start-up businesses that are developing clean energy technologies.

Successive Australian governments have been slow to grasp this reality, and we are now playing catch-up with many other countries.

Australia Releases Its Strategy

The Australian government’s Sustainable Finance Strategy, released by Treasurer Jim Chalmers last Thursday, lays solid foundations for this recovery. Yet more needs to be done if Australia is to achieve the strategy’s stated ambition to be a global sustainability finance leader.

The strategy is arranged around three core pillars. The first focuses on creating access to information that is credible, accurate and of practical value. It seeks to ensure markets operate efficiently and money flows to where it is most needed.

From July 1 2024, large Australian companies and financial institutions will have to disclose information about the impacts of climate on their business, the risks climate change poses to their operations, and how they plan to decarbonise.

The disclosure requirements will be based on internationally accepted standards, to ensure Australian and overseas investors can compare data across companies and countries.

The government is also supporting the development of an Australian sustainable finance taxonomy – a set of criteria that enables investors to evaluate whether and to what extent an investment supports sustainability goals.

A taxonomy spells out which investments result in real decarbonisation, and reduces the likelihood of false claims about the sustainability of projects and investments. A government agency will manage the taxonomy, which will start as a voluntary code but may eventually become mandatory.

Large companies will also be required to disclose their net zero transition plan, if they have one. With companies representing 80% of the market capitalisation of ASX 200 companies pledging to achieve net zero emissions, the government wants to ensure their plans are credible. It wants the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), to set out its expectations of the plans – a welcome step.

The second pillar focuses on building the capabilities of Australia’s financial system regulators to manage risk and to clamp down on greenwashing – the practice of making misleading or deceptive claims about the environmental benefits of activities or assets.

Fighting Greenwashing

ASIC Deputy Chair Karen Chester believes the economic cost and loss of investor confidence caused by greenwashing “cannot be overstated”. Her organisation has set out guidelines to help financial institutions identify it. This year ASIC launched its first three legal actions, including one against the local arm of US investment giant Vanguard, and another against Active Super, which allegedly falsely claimed it had eliminated investments, such as coal mining, that posed too great a risk to the environment and the community.

The third pillar concerns government leadership and engagement. Such a large and rapid increase in the scale of private sector finance requires growth in a range of financial assets, including shares, bonds and other kinds of debt.

The government is supporting the development of a green bond market by issuing Australia’s first green sovereign bond in June. These bonds are designed to establish standards for lending and borrowing for all green finance; they will also help the government to fund projects such as electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

Finally, the strategy recognises the importance of collaboration across the Asia-Pacific. If Australia achieves its goal of becoming a regional sustainable finance hub it would not only benefit our national interest but help Pacific Island nations to raise the finance to decarbonise.

What’s Missing From The Strategy?

The strategy does not focus on green finance skills and competencies. Yet these capabilities, ranging from a basic understanding of what business activities are unsustainable to specialist expertise in the use of scenario analysis to assess climate risk, are essential to the net zero transition.

LinkedIn’s recent Green Skills Report shows that, globally, the finance sector is lagging behind other sectors in building green skills. And Australia ranks only 30th in a list of countries on its share of talent for green finance.

Australia’s financial system must urgently transform itself to meet the climate challenge. If the financing of the transition were a bicycle race, Australia has now caught up to the global peloton. The next step is to take the lead.

Alison Atherton, Program Lead, Business, Economy and Governance at the Institute for Sustainable Futures., University of Technology Sydney and Gordon Noble, Research Director, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney

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

Our minds handle risk strangely – and that’s partly why we delayed climate action so long

We now have a very narrow window to significantly and rapidly slash greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the most disastrous effects of climate change, with just an estimated six years left before we blow our carbon budget to stay below 1.5°C of warming.

We’ve known how gases like carbon dioxide trap heat for over 100 years and alarm bells have been ringing loudly for over 35 years, when climate scientist James Hansen testified that global warming had begun.

As extreme weather and temperatures arrive, many of us wonder whether it had to get this bad before we acted. Did we need to see to believe? What role has our own psychology played in our sluggishness?

How Do We Respond To Threats?

From a psychology point of view, motivating us to take action on climate is a wicked problem. Many factors combine to make it harder for us to act.

The necessary policies and behaviour changes have been viewed as too hard or costly. Until recently, the consequences of doing nothing have been seen as a distant problem. Given the complexity of climate modelling, it has been difficult for scientists and policymakers to lay out what the specific environmental consequences would be from any given action or when they would manifest.

As if that’s not enough, climate change presents a collective-action problem. It would do little good for Australia to reach net-zero emissions if other countries keep emitting without change.

When we write about climate change, we often frame it as an ever more urgent and significant threat to our way of life. We do this thinking that showing the seriousness of the threat will galvanise others into faster action.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. When we’re confronted with big risks – and the need for a painful shift from the status quo – some of us respond unexpectedly. We might find ourselves motivated to seek out evidence to undercut the reality of the threat, and use this uncertainty to justify staying on the same path.

One unfortunate aspect of this is that people motivated to avoid or deny climate risk are actually better able to do so when they have more scientific training. This background equips them better to counter-argue and rationalise the dissonance, meaning they seek out information to align with their beliefs and justify their passivity. Misinformation and doubt are particularly damaging to climate action. They let us feel OK about inaction.

This tendency to rationalise away risk was also clearly visible among people who downplayed the impact or even denied the existence of COVID-19.

Is there an antidote?

We’ve found explaining the simple and well-understood way that emissions of specific gases trap the Sun’s heat and warm the planet can be effective, because people can’t rationalise these facts away. The greenhouse effect is a well-accepted phenomenon, even by those most sceptical of global warming. After all, it’s essential to life on Earth – without these gases trapping heat, the world would be too cold for life.

Why Are We Finally Acting?

As climate change has moved out of the computer models and become very much a part of our present, we are seeing stronger efforts to cut emissions.

More and more of us are experiencing tangible events such as forest fires, droughts, sudden floods, rapidly intensifying hurricanes or record-breaking heatwaves. This has removed one barrier to inaction. Until now, the consequences of doing nothing seemed far off and uncertain. Now they are seen as certain and already present.

Better still, technological advancement and economies of scale in production have meant clean energy and clean transport have fallen significantly in price.

At government and individual levels, there are now measures we can take that aren’t too costly and come with immediate gains such as cutting power bills or avoiding petrol price increases. Greater political consensus in many countries is also helping challenge the inertia of the status quo. That’s another barrier to action evaporating.

As climate damage gets worse, we’re likely to see ever-starker warnings. Does fear motivate us? When faced with threats, we are more likely to take action, particularly if we think we can make a difference.

Yes, we now have a very narrow window to avert the worst. But we also have an increased certainty about climate change and the damage it causes, as well as greater confidence in our ability to bring about change.

For years, our own psychology slowed down efforts to make the sweeping changes necessary to quit fossil fuels. Now, at least, some of these psychological barriers are getting smaller. 

Jeff Rotman, Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Consumer Psychology & Co-Director of the Better Consumption Lab, Deakin University

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

Planet Earth III: how cookie cutter nature programming could fail to educate and inform audiences

Perhaps nothing embodies the BBC’s values of inform, educate and entertain more than its nature documentaries. Planet Earth III is the latest in a proud tradition going back to the founding of the BBC Natural History Unit in 1957 and has everything devoted fans (myself included) expect.

There are sweeping shots, a soaring orchestral soundtrack, and exciting scenes of hunting, courtship and breeding. Tender family relations, desperate chases and amazing survival stories are all narrated in Sir David Attenborough’s signature style. Planet Earth III brings us all the beauty and wonder we know and love – which may be a problem when it tries to sound an urgent warning about the future of our world.

In terms of its story, Planet Earth III warns of environmental catastrophe more than any similar BBC show before it. The second episode includes a heartbreaking scene of seals caught screaming in a fishing net and ends with a question: can animals really adapt to survive our changing planet?

Part of this new willingness from the BBC to tackle environmental collapse head-on is due to the climate and ecological crisis that has become increasingly obvious and urgent. But another cause can be found in another crisis the BBC is facing.

What we might call the “planet format” has become so perfected and so popular, that the BBC’s competitors are eager to pick it up themselves. The format is a good fit for streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Apple+. But with them all creating similar programmes, what effect does that have on their ability to inform, educate or entertain?

Comforting Catastrophe

Nature and wildlife stories are universally engaging and are great for showing off high budgets and virtuoso filmmaking. Copyright laws can protect a show’s characters or plot, but not a visual, musical or storytelling style.

This has led to many competitors fighting for a slice of this global market with shows that look, feel and sound virtually the same. Netflix has expanded their scope with Our Planet, Our Planet II and Our Universe (2022). Apple+ came out with Prehistoric Planet (2022). The format – from the timbre and rhythm of Attenborough’s narration to the style of shots – is even now used globally in productions like the Indian Wild Karnataka (2019).

It’s good to have more documentaries tackling the collapse of the natural world. But, I do wonder, what effect their looking and sounding the same might have on their ability to really educate audiences about the climate crisis and communicate the urgency of it. These stories all follow a single format, comforting in its familiarity but should anything that seeks to educate about climate catastrophe be comforting?

The planet formula is not just the stories it tells – it’s also how it tells them. Whether Planet Earth or Our Planet, Wild Karnataka or for the BBC’s Wild Isles (2023), the sweeping shots of pristine wilderness, the striking views and the orchestral music are the same. And the main emotion this formula works to inspire is not urgency, but awe.

An academic report commissioned by the BBC tells us that watching nature documentaries can soothe climate anxiety. This may seem paradoxical when the narration tells us about the loss of precious species and habitats. But consider what the format spends most of its time showing us: untouched landscapes unfolding endlessly from the air, beautiful animals in super high definition, and no humans in sight. Even Attenborough is only present through his calm and grandfatherly tone.

Neither Netflix nor anyone else has attempted to change these features: they are baked too deeply into the successful formula, and keeping to the formula is what keeps audiences coming. The narration in Planet Earth III might be telling us that time is running out to act, but the show invites us to sit back and absorb.

There is also the question of diversity. The climate crisis is a global problem with many faces, but the BBC’s planet format was born out of a particularly British tradition of nature programming. What do we lose when environmental stories are all told through the same lens and speak with the same voice?

Tackling Climate Change Head On

The increase in competition has led to one important change. Produced by the BBC’s frequent partner Silverback, Our Planet, which was released in 2019, was shot and edited in the same familiar and beloved style and featured the same type of animal stories. The first season did, however, offer one distinct competitive edge: a clear focus on environmental issues, which the BBC’s had been sorely lacking.

The BBC’s nature documentaries have come under considerable criticism over the years for not addressing the climate and ecological crisis. Historically, the BBC had chosen to stay neutral on the debate about human-caused global heating and this decision affected the Planet shows.

To undermine their rival, Netflix partnered with the World Wildlife Federation for Our Planet and widely promoted the show’s environmental message to audiences. The streaming platform presented itself as more progressive and cutting-edge than the staid and conservative BBC.

It was now survival of the fittest in the field of nature documentaries and this was not a bad thing for the BBC who now had to adapt and improve their nature content in the face of competition by explicitly tackling climate.

This one change, while great and urgently needed, has been quickly folded into the planet format and is a feature of all subsequent nature shows. This one change was not enough.

The popularity of nature documentaries means they can play an important role in making audiences aware of the state of our world. But for the Planet format to survive in the changing media ecosystem, the TV industry must keep an eye on whether and how it can continue to evolve.

We are seeing this happen as Planet Earth III shows the BBC rising to Netflix’s challenge by focusing on environmental issues. This is an encouraging sign but more innovative programming is needed.

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Leora Hadas, Assistant Professor, Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham

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

Heat, cold, pollution, noise and insects: too many apartment blocks aren’t up to the challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the impacts of air quality on high-rise living. However, apartments face a range of atmospheric challenges. These include air and noise pollution, temperature and weather extremes, bushfire smoke and insects.

Our newly published research shows how apartment residents struggle with the impacts of unhealthy homes. It’s a result of decades of urban planning based on fossil fuel use and high-rise building standards poorly adapted to the Australian environment.

Our study involved residents of apartments in Liverpool CBD in New South Wales. They are exposed to particulate pollution from heavy truck movements tied to the Moorebank freight terminal, smoke from increasingly severe bushfires and a rising number of days of extreme heat each year.

Residents in our study preferred centrally located apartments to detached, car-dependent houses. However, our interviews revealed apartments were hot in summer, cold in winter and prone to mould, condensation, noise and air pollution. The lower people’s socioeconomic status, the more likely they are to be exposed to such problems.

At the same time, residents’ experiences pointed to low-cost, low-tech solutions. Sustainable, climate-adapted apartment designs would allow for better natural airflow, shading and screening.

Buildings That Are Bad For Health And Sleep

Ayasha’s experience in a two-bedroom apartment, built in 2017, highlighted the health costs of flawed design and a lack of insulation. She told us:

[…] at night-time it gets really cold because of the fog, like the interior glass gets wet and the room is always wet even when the heater is on […] Both of my daughter and me are having this cough thing because of the continuous heater […] For the last three weeks continuously she has this runny nose, like teary eyes and cough. She’s not recovering at all.

For Naomi, dampness in the 2016 two-bedroom apartment she and her husband bought caused concern about mould:

We’re conscious of the mould and we’re trying to keep the house aerated but it is very hard. In the bathroom, there’s a vent but it’s not strong and you don’t really want the window open for too long when it’s cold, so it does get a real build-up of moisture […] You’ll wake up and you can see a layer of wet all up the windows and on the ledge and it’s really hard to dry everything out.

Sarah’s 2018 apartment lacked flyscreens and ceiling fans to allow natural airflow through all the rooms. She said air conditioning became essential for coping with summer heat and avoiding unwanted insects.

We did open the doors a couple of times, the mosquitoes would get in and they would attack the baby. Like one time, she had 20 bites on her head one night […] and that was when we realised, no, we’re just gonna have to put the air con on.

Wanted: Better Regulations And Development Models

Residents’ experiences reflect low building standards in Australia.

Recent research on how to deliver sustainable apartment housing underscores the limitations of the National Construction Code, building materials and minimum regulations. This 2023 study called for better regulations targeting project design, compliance with standards, property valuation and transparent information about properties’ sustainability features.

As with all complex reforms, there are concerns the development industry will resist. Thus, some have suggested expanding the build-to-rent sector to achieve more sustainable apartment design.

Typically, diversified construction, finance and superannuation firms support this model of developing housing specifically to be rented. They have deeper pockets and a longer-term interest in the energy performance of buildings.

Yet studies show the build-to-rent sector is concentrated in higher-value locations. Costly subsidies and incentives would be needed to move it to areas where better, affordable housing is most needed.

Low-Cost, Low-Tech Solutions

Residents’ experiences reveal a range of low-cost, low-tech solutions that could easily be mandated for all apartment housing. These solutions include flyscreens, ceiling fans, external shading and adequate insulation.

Reminiscent of pre-air-conditioning building design, these solutions allow for flexibility in building facades, enabling both airflow and screening.

The same principles characterised early 20th-century, high-rise architecture. These buildings featured terraces, mesh balustrades, exhaust flues, cross-ventilation, sunrooms, external shading, louvres and screens “as a strategy of climate adaptability”.

The rise of air conditioning in the 20th century cemented apartments as enclosed environments. Models that depend on shutting the doors and windows and turning on the air conditioner are no longer viable in a climate crisis. Increasing living costs also mean many households can’t afford to use air conditioning.

COVID-19, too, has made enhancing natural airflow in buildings more important.

Time To Champion An Australian High-Rise Architecture

Australian governments, including the NSW government, have committed to delivering more affordable housing. But high-rise developments are often sited in polluted, noisy, freezing and sweltering environments. They get clustered around freeways and other busy roads to avoid political backlash from residents opposed to such developments.

At the same time, housing researchers are increasingly concerned about the energy emissions of high-rise buildings.

Planning that optimises building orientation – to best access sunlight and ventilation – and apartment design standards adapted to the Australian environment are urgently needed. Otherwise households will be locked into unsustainable, single-access apartments devoid of cross-ventilation, screens or shading.

This sort of housing is bad for residents’ health and wellbeing. It will also add to energy poverty for decades to come.

Nicole Cook, Lecturer, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong and Sophie-May Kerr, Research Associate, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

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

PFAS: how research is uncovering damaging effects of ‘forever chemicals’

Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they’ve been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health.

PFAS have, in fact, come under intense scrutiny due to new research showing their persistent nature in the environment and potential health impacts.

So what are they and are they an issue in the UK and Ireland?

Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals, numbering approximately 4,700 variants. What makes them different is their formidable carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds, renowned among scientists as the mightiest in chemistry.

This stability makes them an important ingredient in many products. PFAS, in various forms, have played pivotal roles in creating oil- and grease-resistant food packaging, non-stick cookware, water- and stain-resistant textiles, and fire-fighting foams, to name a few. Their versatility has propelled them into our daily lives.

The strength of their carbon-fluorine bonds is also what makes them resist breakdown by natural processes. Their longevity, often measured in centuries, has earned them the moniker of “legacy compounds”.

Forever Chemicals

Their presence has been detected in worrying concentrations in drinking water, soil, air and even in Arctic ice. Recent scientific investigations have unveiled a concerning connection between PFAS exposure and damage to health, both in humans and animals.

These effects include an increased risk of cancer, liver damage, compromised immune function, developmental disorders and hormonal disruption.

The adverse health effects can be traced to their persistence within the human body. Unlike many substances that are metabolised and eliminated over time, PFAS accumulate in bodily tissues and fluids without breaking down.

This accumulation creates a perpetual, self-sustaining cycle: PFAS contamination permeates rivers, soil and the food chain. These chemicals find their way into the bodies of humans and animals, where they continue to accumulate over time.

The mounting evidence of PFAS-related health risks has triggered global concern. Organisations such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants have set their sights on imposing stricter regulations on PFAS use within the European Union.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the long-term health consequences of PFAS exposure, but the increasing global concern is indisputable.

In the UK and Ireland, PFAS contamination infiltrates everyday consumer products and industrial processes. In 2019, the UK Environment Agency’s screening consistently identified PFAS in surface water samples, with PFOA and PFOS found at 96% of the sites they surveyed.

The presence of heightened PFAS concentrations signifies that none of England’s rivers meet the “good chemical” status criteria established by the Water Framework Directive. The Chief Scientist’s Group report identified military and civilian airfields, landfills and wastewater treatment facilities as the likely sources of PFAS contamination.

A pressing issue in Europe and the UK is the absence of standardised regulations regarding these forever chemicals. Only two of the most prevalent PFAS variants, PFOA and PFOS, are currently monitored in the UK.

The Environment Agency’s 2021 report underscored gaps in the environmental monitoring of PFAS in British waters.

These gaps include a lack of toxicology information about how PFAS are released throughout the life cycle of consumer products and drinking water, for instance recycling and waste disposal practices. This makes it difficult to properly assess the risks forever chemicals may pose.

The Solution

It’s important to acknowledge that certain PFAS play a crucial role in drug formulations and medical uses.

But the lack of research, testing, and public awareness surrounding these compounds has allowed this issue to persist for too long, mostly due to the useful properties of forever chemicals.

The intricacies associated with PFAS mean we need a holistic approach involving research to discover new chemical compounds that do not harm the environment and human health.

While the solution is complex, it is undoubtedly achievable. We need stringent regulations, more research and a global effort to eliminate PFAS. The pay off is worth it – a safer and healthier future for both our planet and its inhabitants.

Eadaoin Carthy, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Dublin City University and Abrar Abdelsalam, Research Assistant in Biomedical Engineering, Dublin City University

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

Acapulco was built to withstand earthquakes, but not Hurricane Otis’ destructive winds – how building codes failed this resort city

Acapulco wasn’t prepared when Hurricane Otis struck as a powerful Category 5 storm on Oct. 25, 2023. The short notice as the storm rapidly intensified over the Pacific Ocean wasn’t the only problem – the Mexican resort city’s buildings weren’t designed to handle anything close to Otis’ 165 mph winds.

While Acapulco’s oceanfront high-rises were built to withstand the region’s powerful earthquakes, they had a weakness.

Since powerful hurricanes are rare in Acapulco, Mexico’s building codes didn’t require that their exterior materials be able to hold up to extreme winds. In fact, those materials were often kept light to help meet earthquake building standards.

Otis’ powerful winds ripped off exterior cladding and shattered windows, exposing bedrooms and offices to the wind and rain. The storm took dozens of lives and caused billions of dollars in damage.

I have worked on engineering strategies to enhance disaster resilience for over three decades and recently wrote a book, “The Blessings of Disaster,” about the gambles humans take with disaster risk and how to increase resilience. Otis provided a powerful example of one such gamble that exists when building codes rely on probabilities that certain hazards will occur based on recorded history, rather than considering the severe consequences of storms that can devastate entire cities.

The Fatal Flaw In Building Codes

Building codes typically provide “probabilistic-based” maps that specify wind speeds that engineers must consider when designing buildings.

The problem with that approach lies in the fact that “probabilities” are simply the odds that extreme events of a certain size will occur in the future, mostly calculated based on past occurrences. Some models may include additional considerations, but these are still typically anchored in known experience.

This is all good science. Nobody argues with that. It allows engineers to design structures in accordance with a consensus on what are deemed acceptable return periods for various hazards, referring to the likelihood of those disasters occurring. Return periods are a somewhat arbitrary assessment of what is a reasonable balance between minimizing risk and keeping building costs reasonable.

However, probabilistic maps only capture the odds of the hazard occurring. A probabilistic map might specify a wind speed to consider for design, irrespective of whether that given location is a small town with a few hotels or a megapolis with high-rises and complex urban infrastructure. In other words, probabilistic maps do not consider the consequences when an extreme hazard exceeds the specified value and “all hell breaks loose.”

How Probability Left Acapulco Exposed

According to the Mexican building code, hotels, condos and other commercial and office buildings in Acapulco must be designed to resist 88 mph winds, corresponding to the strongest wind likely to occur on average once every 50 years there. That’s a Category 1 storm.

A 200-year return period for wind is used for essential facilities, such as hospital and school buildings, corresponding to 118 mph winds. But over a building’s life span of, say, 50 years, that still leaves a 22% change that winds exceeding 118 mph will occur (yes, the world of statistics is that sneaky).

The probability wind maps for both return periods show Acapulco experiences lower average wind speeds than much of the 400 miles of Mexican coast north of the city. Yet, Acapulco is a major city, with a metropolitan population of over 1 million. It also has more than 50 buildings taller than 20 stories, according to the SkyscraperPage, a database of skyscrapers, and it is the only city with buildings that tall along that stretch of the Pacific coast.

Designing for a 50-year return period in this case is questionable, as it implies a near 100% chance of encountering wind exceeding this design value for a building with a 50-year life span or greater.

Florida Faces Similiar Challenges

The shortcomings of probabilistic-based maps that specify wind speeds have also been observed in the United States. For example, new buildings along most of Florida’s coast must be able to resist 140 mph winds or greater, but there are a few exceptions. One is the Big Bend area where Hurricane Idalia made landfall in 2023. Its design wind speed is about 120 mph instead.

A 2023 update to the Florida Building Code raised the minimum wind speed to approximately 140 mph in Mexico Beach, the Panhandle town that was devastated by Hurricane Michael in 2018. The Big Bend exception may be the next one to be eliminated.

Acapulco’s Earthquake Design Weakness

A saving grace for Acapulco is that it is located in one of Mexico’s most active seismic risk zones – for example, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck nearby in 2021. As a result, the lateral-load-resisting structural systems in tall buildings there are designed to resist seismic forces that are generally larger than hurricane forces.

However, a drawback is that the larger the mass of a building, the larger the seismic forces the building must be designed to resist. Consequently, light materials were typically used for the cladding – the exterior surface of the building that protects it against the weather – because that translates into lower seismic forces. This light cladding was not able to withstand hurricane-force winds.

Had the cladding not failed, the full wind forces would have been transferred to the structural system, and the buildings would have survived with little or no damage.

A ‘Good Engineering Approach’ To Hazards

A better building code could go one step beyond “good science” probabilistic maps and adopt a “good engineering approach” by taking stock of the consequences of extreme events occurring, not just the odds that they will.

In Florida, the incremental cost of designing for wind speeds of 140 mph rather than 120 mph is marginal compared to total building cost, given that cladding able to resist more than 140 mph is already used in nearly all of the state. In Acapulco, with the spine of buildings already able to resist earthquake forces much larger than hurricane forces, designing cladding that can withstand stronger hurricane-level forces is likely to be an even smaller percentage of total project cost.

Someday, the way that design codes deal with extreme events such as hurricanes, not only in Mexico, will hopefully evolve to more broadly account for what is at risk at the urban scale. Unfortunately, as I explain in “The Blessings of Disaster,” we will see more extreme disasters before society truly becomes disaster resilient.

Michel Bruneau, Professor of Engineering, University at Buffalo

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

5 Aussie musicals you might not have heard of – but really should see

When you think of great Aussie musicals, some key films from the 1990s and 2000s come to mind: Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Moulin Rouge!, Bran Nue Dae and The Sapphires. These films are often framed as “reviving” the musical genre for Australian audiences, due in large part to their box-office success.

While certainly fantastic films, there is actually a long history of Aussie musicals that have been popular with cinema audiences since the 1930s.

There are 73 films that have been classified as a “musical” or containing musical elements by the National Film and Sound Archive. They include comedies, children’s and animated films, dramas, revues, backstage musicals, biopics, dance films, rock musicals, soundtrack films, television musicals and live concert films.

So where to begin? These are my top five Aussie musicals you may not have heard of but should definitely try to see.

These films represent just a snapshot of the rich history of musical cinema in Australia. They demonstrate how Australian cinema responds to international trends in musical cinema production, but also how it influences and innovates in the global musical genre.

These films are hard to get a hold of and only occasionally pop up on streaming services – if at all. However, you might catch them on DVD or at your local indie film festival or retrospective (there were several screenings of Starstruck when the NFSA released a digitally restored version in 2015).

1. Funny Things Happen Down Under

Olivia Newton-John’s 1965 debut feature, Funny Things Happen Down Under, directed by Joe McCormick, was an adaptation of the Terrible Ten children’s television show from 1959–60.

It’s Christmas time in the bush and a group of country children make a plan to save their woolshed, under threat because the sheep station has to be sold.

After they accidentally turn a goat’s wool multi-coloured because it drinks a strange concoction of Christmas pudding, flowers and fizzy water, they decide to feed it to the sheep to sell rainbow-coloured wool.

While certainly of its time (there is a scene that involves yellow face), the film has some great songs by Newton-John and New Zealand singer Howard Morrison, as well as an athletic final dance number around the shed called Click Go the Shears.

2. Oz

Directed by Chris Lofven, the 1976 film Oz (also known as Oz: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Road Movie, or 20th Century Oz on its release in the United States) is a version of The Wizard of Oz as a rock ‘n’ roll road movie set in the Australian outback.

Dorothy (Joy Dunstan) is hitchhiking to the city to see glam rocker The Wizard. Along the way she meets brainless surfie (Bruce “Stork” Spence) – the scarecrow – a mean mechanic (Michael Carman) – the tin man – and an overly confident bikie (Gary Waddell) – the lion.

Ross Wilson, the frontman of Daddy Cool and Mondo Rock, wrote and produced Oz’s musical score. The singles Livin’ in the Land of Oz by Wilson and Beating Around the Bush by Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons were both released in 1976 from the soundtrack.

Much like motorcycle road movie Easy Rider (1970), which had become a symbol of New Hollywood, Oz made a direct appeal to young audiences and the counterculture via a compilation soundtrack of contemporary popular music.

3. Starstruck

Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (1982) is a backstage musical set in 1980s Sydney. Barmaid Jackie (Jo Kennedy) lives above her family pub The Harbour View Hotel in The Rocks in Sydney with her mum, Nanna, cousin Angus and their pet cockatoo.

Jackie dreams of being a star, falls for a guitarist and joins a band called The Wombats so they can enter a TV talent competition.

Cue numerous musical numbers including Body and Soul, where Jackie dances on the bar, and an eventual performance at the Opera House after the band sneak on stage.

There’s also a fabulously camp Busby Berkeley-eque rooftop swimming pool number complete with co-ordinated lifeguards in speedos.

4. Dogs In Space

Rather than a traditional musical, Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space (1986) is set in the underground punk scene in late 1970s Melbourne. It follows rocker Sammy (played by Aussie icon Michael Hutchence) through performing, partying, falling in love – and taking lots and lots of drugs.

The film has some amazing cinematography with winding long takes of the cast at their crammed inner-city terrace house as it gets progressively trashed by party after party.

Sammy’s love story with girlfriend Anna (Saskia Post) ends in tragedy and the final song, Rooms for the Memory, effectively uses Hutchence’s brooding star presence and vocals to great effect.

5. One Night The Moon

Based on true events from 1932, One Night the Moon (2001), written by First Nations director Rachel Perkins, features Aussie singer-songwriter Paul Kelly as the father of a girl (played by Memphis Kelly, his real daughter) who goes missing in the outback.

The girl’s mother (played by Kelly’s then wife and Memphis’ mother, Kaarin Fairfax) wants to employ an Aboriginal tracker (Kelton Pell) to help find the girl. Her father refuses, thus sealing the fate of his daughter through his prejudice.

With haunting songwriting and sweeping shots of the unforgiving landscape, this is a beautiful and moving story. 

Phoebe Macrossan, Lecturer in Screen Media, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

How we’re building the world’s biggest optical telescope to crack some of the greatest puzzles in science

Astronomers get to ask some of the most fundamental questions there are, ranging from whether we’re alone in the cosmos to what the nature of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter making up most of the universe is.

Now a large group of astronomers from all over the world is building the biggest optical telescope ever – the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — in Chile. Once construction is completed in 2028, it could provide answers that transform our knowledge of the universe.

With its 39-metre diameter primary mirror, the ELT will contain the largest, most perfect reflecting surface ever made. Its light-collecting power will exceed that of all other large telescopes combined, enabling it to detect objects millions of times fainter than the human eye can see.

There are several reasons why we need such a telescope. Its incredible sensitivity will let it image some of the first galaxies ever formed, with light that has travelled for 13 billion years to reach the telescope. Observations of such distant objects may allow us to refine our understanding of cosmology and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Alien Life

The ELT may also offer an answer to the most fundamental question of all: are we alone in the universe? The ELT is expected to be the first telescope to track down Earth-like exoplanets — planets that orbit other stars but have a similar mass, orbit and proximity to their host as Earth.

Occupying the so-called Goldilocks zone, these Earth-like planets will orbit their star at just the right distance for water to neither boil nor freeze – providing the conditions for life to exist.

The ELT’s camera will have six times better resolution than that of the James Webb Space Telescope, allowing it to take the clearest images yet of exoplanets. But fascinating as these pictures will be, they will not tell the whole story.

To learn if life is likely to exist on an exoplanet, astronomers must complement imaging with spectroscopy. While images reveal shape, size and structure, spectra tell us about the speed, temperature and even the chemistry of astronomical objects.

The ELT will contain not one, but four spectrographs — instruments that disperse light into its constituent colours, much like the iconic prism on the Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album cover.

Each about the size of a minibus, and carefully environmentally controlled for stability, these spectrographs underpin all of the ELT’s key science cases. For giant exoplanets, the Harmoni instrument will analyse light that has travelled through their atmospheres, looking for the signs of water, oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide and other gases that indicate the existence of life.

To detect much smaller Earth-like exoplanets, the more specialised Andes instrument will be needed. With a cost of around €35 million (£30 million), Andes will be able to detect tiny changes in the wavelength of light.

From previous satellite missions, astronomers already have a good idea of where to look in the sky for exoplanets. Indeed, there have been several thousand confirmed or “candidate” exoplanets detected using the “transit method”. Here, a space telescope stares at a patch of sky containing thousands of stars and looks for tiny, periodic dips in their intensities, caused when an orbiting planet passes in front of its star.

But Andes will use a different method to hunt for other Earths. As an exoplanet orbits its host star, its gravity tugs on the star, making it wobble. This movement is incredibly small; Earth’s orbit causes the Sun to oscillate at just 10 centimetres per second — the walking speed of a tortoise.

Just as the pitch of an ambulance siren rises and falls as it travels towards and away from us, the wavelength of light observed from a wobbling star increases and decreases as the planet traces out its orbit.

Remarkably, Andes will be able to detect this minuscule change in the light’s colour. Starlight, while essentially continuous (“white”) from the ultraviolet to the infrared, contains bands where atoms in the outer region of the star absorb specific wavelengths as the light escapes, appearing dark in the spectra.

Tiny shifts in the positions of these features — around 1/10,000th of a pixel on the Andes sensor — may, over months and years, reveal the periodic wobbles. This could ultimately help us to find an Earth 2.0.

At Heriot-Watt University, we are piloting the development of a laser system known as a frequency comb, that will enable Andes to reach such exquisite precision. Like the millimetre ticks on a ruler, the laser will calibrate the Andes spectrograph by providing a spectrum of light structured as thousands of regularly spaced wavelengths.

This scale will remain constant over decades, mitigating the measurement errors that occur from environmental changes in temperature and pressure.

With the ELT’s construction cost coming in at €1.45 billion, some will question the value of the project. But astronomy has a significance that spans millennia and transcends cultures and national borders. It is only by looking far outside our Solar System that we can gain a perspective beyond the here and now.

Derryck Telford Reid, Professor of Physics, Heriot-Watt University

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

Your mental dictionary is part of what makes you unique − here’s how your brain stores and retrieves words

The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that’s OK, because everyone already walks around with a dictionary – not the one on your phone, but the one in your head.

Just like a physical dictionary, your mental dictionary contains information about words. This includes the letters, sounds and meaning, or semantics, of words, as well as information about parts of speech and how you can fit words together to form grammatical sentences. Your mental dictionary is also like a thesaurus. It can help you connect words and see how they might be similar in meaning, sound or spelling.

As a researcher who studies word retrieval, or how you quickly and accurately pull words out of your memory to communicate, I’m intrigued by how words are organized in our mental dictionaries. Everyone’s mental dictionary is a little bit different. And I’m even more intrigued by how we can restore the content of our mental dictionaries or improve our use of them, particularly for those who have language disorders.

Language is part of what makes humans special, and I believe everyone deserves the chance to use their words with others.

Your Mental Dictionary

While a physical dictionary is helpful for shared knowledge, your personal mental dictionary is customized based on your individual experiences. What words are in my mental dictionary might overlap with the mental dictionary of someone else who also speaks the same language, but there will also be a lot of differences between the content of our dictionaries.

You add words to your mental dictionary through your educational, occupational, cultural and other life experiences. This customization also means that the size of mental dictionaries is a little bit different from person to person and varies by age. Researchers found that the average 20-year-old American English speaker knows about 42,000 unique words, and this number grows to about 48,000 by age 60. Some people will have even larger vocabularies.

By now, you might be envisioning your mental dictionary as a book with pages of words in alphabetical order you can flip through as needed. While this visual analogy is helpful, there is a lot of debate about how mental dictionaries are organized. Many scholars agree that it’s probably not like an alphabetized book.

One widely rejected theory, the grandmother cell theory, suggests that each concept is encoded by a single neuron. This implies that you would have a neuron for every word that you know, including “grandmother.”

While not accepted as accurate, the aspect of the grandmother cell theory suggesting that certain parts of the brain are more important for some types of information than others is likely true. For example, the left temporal lobe on the side of your brain has many regions that are important for language processing, including word retrieval and production. Rather than a single neuron responsible for processing a concept, a model called parallel distributed processing proposes that large networks of neurons across the brain work together to bring about word knowledge when they fire together.

For example, when I say the word “dog,” there are lots of different aspects of the word that your brain is retrieving, even if unconsciously. You might be thinking about what a dog smells like after being out in the rain, what a dog sounds like when it barks, or what a dog feels like when you pet it. You might be thinking about a specific dog you grew up with, or you might have a variety of emotions about dogs based on your past experiences with them. All of these different features of “dog” are processed in slightly different parts of your brain.

Using Your Mental Dictionary

One reason why your mental dictionary can’t be like a physical dictionary is that it is dynamic and quickly accessed.

Your brain’s ability to retrieve a word is very fast. In one study, researchers mapped the time course of word retrieval among 24 college students by recording their brain activity while they named pictures. They found evidence that participants selected words within 200 milliseconds of seeing the image. After word selection, their brain continued to process information about that word, like what sounds are needed to say that chosen word and ignoring related words. This is why you can retrieve words with such speed in real-time conversations, often so quickly that you give little conscious attention to that process.

Until … you have a breakdown in word retrieval. One common failure in word retrieval is called the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. It’s the feeling when you know what word you want to use but are unable to find it in that moment. You might even know specific details about the word you want, like other words with similar meaning or maybe the first letter or sound of that word. With enough time, the word you wanted might pop into your mind.

These tip-of-the-tongue experiences are a normal part of human language experience across the life span, and they increase as you grow older. One proposed reason for this increase is that they’re due to an age-related disruption in the ability to turn on the right sounds needed to say the selected word.

For some people, though, tip-of-the-tongue experiences and other speech errors can be quite impairing. This is commonly seen in aphasia, a language disorder that often occurs after injury to the language centers of the brain, such as stroke, or neurodegeneration, such as dementia. People with aphasia often have difficulty with word retrieval.

Fortunately, there are treatments available that can help someone improve their word retrieval abilities. For example, semantic feature analysis focuses on strengthening the semantic relationships between words. There are also treatments like phonomotor treatment that focus on strengthening the selection and production of speech sounds needed for word production. There are even apps that remotely provide word retrieval therapy on phones or computers.

The next time you have a conversation with someone, take a moment to reflect on why you chose the specific words you did. Remember that the words you use and the mental dictionary you have are part of what make you and your voice unique.

Nichol Castro, Assistant Professor of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo

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

What’s your chronotype? Knowing whether you’re a night owl or an early bird could help you do better on tests and avoid scams

Timing is everything. For early risers and late-nighters alike, listening to your internal clock may be the key to success. From the classroom to the courtroom and beyond, people perform best on challenging tasks at a time of day that aligns with their circadian rhythm.

Circadian rhythms are powerful internal timekeepers that drive a person’s physiological and intellectual functioning throughout the day. Peaks in these circadian rhythms vary across individuals. Some people, known as larks or morning chronotypes, peak early and feel at their best in the morning. Others, known as owls or evening chronotypes, peak later in the day and perform best in the late afternoon or evening. And some people show neither morning nor evening preferences and are considered neutral chronotypes.

As a researcher seeking ways to improve cognitive function, I’ve explored whether your chronotype affects your mental performance. Understanding the kinds of mental processes that vary – or remain stable – over the course of a day may help people schedule their tasks in a way that optimizes performance.

Why Your Chronotype Matters

Chronotype can be measured with a simple questionnaire that assesses things like your perceived alertness, preferred rising and retiring times and performance throughout the day. Even without a questionnaire, most people have a sense of whether they are a lark or an owl or fall somewhere in between. Do you wake up early, without an alarm, feeling sharp? Are you mentally drained and ready for pj’s by nine? If so, you are likely a morning type. Do you sleep late and wake feeling sluggish and foggy? Are you more energized late at night? If so, you are likely an evening type.

People perform best on many challenging mental tasks – from paying attention and learning to solving problems and making complex decisions – when these actions are synchronized with their personal circadian peaks. This is known as the synchrony effect. Whether you are an air traffic controller scanning the radar, a CFO reviewing an earnings report or a high school student learning chemistry, synchrony can affect how well you perform.

Much of the evidence for synchrony effects comes from lab studies that test both larks and owls early in the morning and late in the day. People with strong chronotypes are more vigilant and better able to sustain attention at their peak relative to off-peak times. Their memories are sharper, with better list recall and more success in remembering “to-do” tasks like taking medication.

People are also less prone to mind wandering and less distracted at their optimal time. For example, a study I conducted gave participants three weakly related cue words (such as “ship,” “outer” and “crawl”). They were tasked to find another word that linked all three (such as “space”). When my team and I presented misleading words alongside the cue words (such as “ocean” for ship, “inner” for outer and “baby” for crawl), those who were tested at synchronous times were better at ignoring the misleading words and finding the target solution than those who weren’t.

Synchrony also affects high-level cognitive functions like persuasion, reasoning and decision-making. Studies on consumers have found that people are more discerning, skeptical and analytical at their peak times. They invest more time and effort in assigned tasks and are more likely to search for important information. Consequently, people make better investment decisions, are less prone to bias and are more likely to detect scams.

At off-peak times it takes people longer to solve problems, and they tend to be less careful and more reliant on mental shortcuts, leaving them vulnerable to flashy marketing schemes. Even ethical behavior can be compromised at non-optimal times, as people are more likely to cheat at their off-peak times.

In The Classroom And The Clinic

The basic mental abilities that are affected by synchrony – including attention, memory and analytical thinking – are all skills that contribute to academic success. This connection is especially significant for teens, who tend to be night owls but typically start school early.

One study randomly assigned over 700 adolescents to exam times in the early morning, late morning or afternoon. Owls had lower scores relative to larks in both morning sessions, but this disadvantage disappeared for owls taking the exam in the afternoon. Early start times may put student owls a step behind larks.

Time of day may also be a consideration when conducting assessments for cognitive disorders like attention-deficit disorder or Alzheimer’s disease. Scheduling time may be particularly significant for older adults, who tend to be larks and often show larger synchrony effects than young adults. Performance is better at peak times on several key neuropsychological measures used to assess these conditions. Failing to consider synchrony may affect the accuracy of diagnoses and subsequently have consequences for clinical trial eligibility and data on treatment effectiveness.

Of course, synchrony doesn’t affect performance on all tasks or for all people. Simple, easy tasks – like recognizing familiar faces or places, dialing a close friend’s phone number or making a favorite recipe – are unlikely to change over the day. Furthermore, young adults who are neither larks nor owls show less variability in performance over the day.

For those who are true early birds or night owls, tackling the toughest mental tasks at times that align with their personal circadian peaks could improve their outcomes. When small improvements in performance offer an essential edge, synchrony may be one secret to success.

Cindi May, Professor of Psychology, College of Charleston

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

How animals get their skin patterns is a matter of physics – new research clarifying how could improve medical diagnostics and synthetic materials

Patterns on animal skin, such as zebra stripes and poison frog color patches, serve various biological functions, including temperature regulation, camouflage and warning signals. The colors making up these patterns must be distinct and well separated to be effective. For instance, as a warning signal, distinct colors make them clearly visible to other animals. And as camouflage, well-separated colors allow animals to better blend into their surroundings.

In our newly published research in Science Advances, my student Ben Alessio and I propose a potential mechanism explaining how these distinctive patterns form – that could potentially be applied to medical diagnostics and synthetic materials.

A thought experiment can help visualize the challenge of achieving distinctive color patterns. Imagine gently adding a drop of blue and red dye to a cup of water. The drops will slowly disperse throughout the water due to the process of diffusion, where molecules move from an area of higher concentration to lower concentration. Eventually, the water will have an even concentration of blue and red dyes and become purple. Thus, diffusion tends to create color uniformity.

A question naturally arises: How can distinct color patterns form in the presence of diffusion?

Movement And Boundaries

Mathematician Alan Turing first addressed this question in his seminal 1952 paper, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.” Turing showed that under appropriate conditions, the chemical reactions involved in producing color can interact with each other in a way that counteracts diffusion. This makes it possible for colors to self-organize and create interconnected regions with different colors, forming what are now called Turing patterns.

However, in mathematical models, the boundaries between color regions are fuzzy due to diffusion. This is unlike in nature, where boundaries are often sharp and colors are well separated.

Our team thought a clue to figuring out how animals create distinctive color patterns could be found in lab experiments on micron-sized particles, such as the cells involved in producing the colors of an animal’s skin. My work and work from other labs found that micron-sized particles form banded structures when placed between a region with a high concentration of other dissolved solutes and a region with a low concentration of other dissolved solutes.

In the context of our thought experiment, changes in the concentration of blue and red dyes in water can propel other particles in the liquid to move in certain directions. As the red dye moves into an area where it is at a lower concentration, nearby particles will be carried along with it. This phenomenon is called diffusiophoresis.

You benefit from diffusiophoresis whenever you do your laundry: Dirt particles move away from your clothing as soap molecules diffuse out from your shirt and into the water.

Drawing Sharp Boundaries

We wondered whether Turing patterns composed of regions of concentration differences could also move micron-sized particles. If so, would the resulting patterns from these particles be sharp and not fuzzy?

To answer this question, we conducted computer simulations of Turing patterns – including hexagons, stripes and double spots – and found that diffusiophoresis makes the resulting patterns significantly more distinctive in all cases. These diffusiophoresis simulations were able to replicate the intricate patterns on the skin of the ornate boxfish and jewel moray eel, which isn’t possible through Turing’s theory alone.

Further supporting our hypothesis, our model was able to reproduce the findings of a lab study on how the bacterium E. coli moves molecular cargo within themselves. Diffusiophoresis resulted in sharper movement patterns, confirming its role as a physical mechanism behind biological pattern formation.

Because the cells that produce the pigments that make up the colors of an animal’s skin are also micron-sized, our findings suggest that diffusiophoresis may play a key role in creating distinctive color patterns more broadly in nature.

Learning Nature’s Trick

Understanding how nature programs specific functions can help researchers design synthetic systems that perform similar tasks.

Lab experiments have shown that scientists can use diffusiophoresis to create membraneless water filters and low-cost drug development tools.

Our work suggests that combining the conditions that form Turing patterns with diffusiophoresis could also form the basis of artificial skin patches. Just like adaptive skin patterns in animals, when Turing patterns change – say from hexagons to stripes – this indicates underlying differences in chemical concentrations inside or outside the body.

Skin patches that can sense these changes could diagnose medical conditions and monitor a patient’s health by detecting changes in biochemical markers. These skin patches could also sense changes in the concentration of harmful chemicals in the environment.

The Work Ahead

Our simulations exclusively focused on spherical particles, while the cells that create pigments in skin come in varying shapes. The effect of shape on the formation of intricate patterns remains unclear.

Furthermore, pigment cells move in a complicated biological environment. More research is needed to understand how that environment inhibits motion and potentially freezes patterns in place.

Besides animal skin patterns, Turing patterns are also crucial to other processes such as embryonic development and tumor formation. Our work suggests that diffusiophoresis may play an underappreciated but important role in these natural processes.

Studying how biological patterns form will help researchers move one step closer to mimicking their functions in the lab – an age-old endeavor that could benefit society.

Ankur Gupta, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

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

Who will write the rules for AI? How nations are racing to regulate artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a label that can cover a huge range of activities related to machines undertaking tasks with or without human intervention. Our understanding of AI technologies is largely shaped by where we encounter them, from facial recognition tools and chatbots to photo editing software and self-driving cars.

If you think of AI you might think of tech companies, from existing giants such as Google, Meta, Alibaba and Baidu, to new players such as OpenAI, Anthropic and others. Less visible are the world’s governments, which are shaping the landscape of rules in which AI systems will operate.

Since 2016, tech-savvy regions and nations across Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America have been establishing regulations targeting AI technologies. (Australia is lagging behind, still currently investigating the possibility of such rules.)

Currently, there are more than 1,600 AI policies and strategies globally. The European Union, China, the United States and the United Kingdom have emerged as pivotal figures in shaping the development and governance of AI in the global landscape.

Ramping Up AI Regulations

AI regulation efforts began to accelerate in April 2021, when the EU proposed an initial framework for regulations called the AI Act. These rules aim to set obligations for providers and users, based on various risks associated with different AI technologies.

As the EU AI Act was pending, China moved forward with proposing its own AI regulations. In Chinese media, policymakers have discussed a desire to be first movers and offer global leadership in both AI development and governance.

Where the EU has taken a comprehensive approach, China has been regulating specific aspects of AI one after another. These have ranged from algorithmic recommendations, to deep synthesis or “deepfake” technology and generative AI.

China’s full framework for AI governance will be made up of these policies and others yet to come. The iterative process lets regulators build up their bureaucratic know-how and regulatory capacity, and leaves flexibility to implement new legislation in the face of emerging risks.

A ‘Wake-Up Call’

China’s AI regulation may have been a wake-up call to the US. In April, influential lawmaker Chuck Shumer said his country should “not permit China to lead on innovation or write the rules of the road” for AI.

On October 30 2023, the White House issued an executive order on safe, secure and trustworthy AI. The order attempts to address broader issues of equity and civil rights, while also concentrating on specific applications of technology.

Alongside the dominant actors, countries with growing IT sectors including Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Italy, Sri Lanka and India have also sought to implement defensive strategies to mitigate potential risks associated with the pervasive integration of AI.

AI regulations worldwide reflect a race against foreign influence. At the geopolitical scale, the US competes with China economically and militarily. The EU emphasises establishing its own digital sovereignty and striving for independence from the US.

On a domestic level, these regulations can be seen as favouring large incumbent tech companies over emerging challengers. This is because it is often expensive to comply with legislation, requiring resources smaller companies may lack.

Alphabet, Meta and Tesla have supported calls for AI regulation. At the same time, the Alphabet-owned Google has joined Amazon in investing billions in OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic, and Tesla boss Elon Musk’s xAI has just launched its first product, a chatbot called Grok.

Shared Vision

The EU’s AI Act, China’s AI regulations, and the White House executive order show shared interests between the nations involved. Together, they set the stage for last week’s “Bletchley declaration”, in which 28 countries including the US, UK, China, Australia and several EU members pledged cooperation on AI safety.

Countries or regions see AI as a contributor to their economic development, national security, and international leadership. Despite the recognised risks, all jurisdictions are trying to support AI development and innovation.

By 2026, worldwide spending on AI-centric systems may pass US$300 billion by one estimate. By 2032, according to a Bloomberg report, the generative AI market alone may be worth US$1.3 trillion.

Numbers like these, and talk of perceived benefits from tech companies, national governments, and consultancy firms, tend to dominate media coverage of AI. Critical voices are often sidelined.

Competing Interests

Beyond economic benefits, countries also look to AI systems for defence, cybersecurity, and military applications.

At the UK’s AI safety summit, international tensions were apparent. While China agreed with the Bletchley declaration made on the summit’s first day, it was excluded from public events on the second day.

One point of disagreement is China’s social credit system, which operates with little transparency. The EU’s AI Act regards social scoring systems of this sort as creating unacceptable risk.

The US perceives China’s investments in AI as a threat to US national and economic security, particularly in terms of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns.

These tensions are likely to hinder global collaboration on binding AI regulations.

The Limitations Of Current Rules

Existing AI regulations also have significant limitations. For instance, there is no clear, common set of definitions of different kinds of AI technology in current regulations across jurisdictions.

Current legal definitions of AI tend to be very broad, raising concern over how practical they are. This broad scope means regulations cover a wide range of systems which present different risks and may deserve different treatments. Many regulations lack clear definitions for risk, safety, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination, posing challenges for ensuring precise legal compliance.

We are also seeing local jurisdictions launch their own regulations within the national frameworks. These may address specific concerns and help to balance AI regulation and development.

California has introduced two bills to regulate AI in employment. Shanghai has proposed a system for grading, management and supervision of AI development at the municipal level.

However, defining AI technologies narrowly, as China has done, poses a risk that companies will find ways to work around the rules.

Moving Forward

Sets of “best practices” for AI governance are emerging from local and national jurisdictions and transnational organisations, with oversight from groups such as the UN’s AI advisory board and the US’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. The existing AI governance frameworks from the UK, the US, the EU, and – to a limited extent – China are likely to be seen as guidance.

Global collaboration will be underpinned by both ethical consensus and more importantly national and geopolitical interests.

Fan Yang, Research fellow at Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society., The University of Melbourne and Ausma Bernot, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University

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

Optus blackout explained: what is a ‘deep network’ outage and what may have caused it?

Optus customers woke up this morning to find they were unable to get their social media fix, and they weren’t happy. Around 4am AEDT, customers started to report an inability to access both mobile and home internet services.

Optus advised it was investigating the issue, with reports emerging around midday of some services coming back online.

Around 12.30pm, Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin told radio 2GB the path to restoration had been found, nearly nine hours after the blackout began.

The outage, one of the largest in Australia’s history, sent alarm bells ringing across the country. With a number of smaller mobile network providers reselling the Optus network, including Aussie Broadband, Amaysim, CatchConnect, Coles Mobile, Dodo, Moose Mobile and more, the impact was felt far and wide.

As the morning progressed, the impact grew. Health and emergency services were unable to communicate, trains in Melbourne were brought to a halt and small businesses across the nation were unable to use Optus EFTPOS.

Fortunately, Optus users could still use roaming to call 000 if they were within the coverage of other telecommunication service providers.

What Is A ‘Deep Network’ Problem?

Earlier today Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland described the incident as a “deep network” problem.

Telecommunications networks include three components: the core, transit and access networks. You can think of the core network as the systems that allow customers’ devices to connect to and access phone and internet services.

The transit network connects the core to the access networks using optical fibre cables. The access networks include the local infrastructure found in suburbs – including the mobile phone towers.

Core network outages can occur when equipment or cables fail, when there is a software fault, or when a cyberattack occurs.

The most common reason for a software fault is when a patch or update is applied and it has an unintended outcome, such as causing one or more of the core network systems to fail.

What Could Have Caused This?

Although Optus hasn’t give any indications as to the exact cause of the outage, Bayer Rosmarin said it was unlikely a cyberattack was the cause:

There is no indication that it is anything to do with spyware at this stage.

At the same time, experts have noted mobile cell towers are working, and there seems to be no damage to the underlying fibre optic network. This means we can probably rule out an issue in the transit or access networks.

The scale and speed with which the impact hit (and the somewhat specific timing) indicates the culprit was likely a problem in the core network.

It’s very possible a software or system update was responsible. Such updates or changes often happen out of business hours to have minimal impact. They typically involve a short period of downtime – a “scheduled outage” – which goes unnoticed by customers.

It could be, as some reports have speculated, the Optus outage was an unplanned consequence of a planned system change, such as a planned update or outage. When these processes go wrong, they can go spectacularly wrong!

As for how such a fault may happen, it is likely due to human error (especially since 4am is a time you might expect engineers to be carrying out patch work). However, it could also be a result of other factors, such as a hardware fault that then causes a software failure.

Another possibility is a fault in an accounting or user management system, such as no longer being able to attribute costs or verify users’ identities properly.

Issues in back-end billing and management systems can generate a cascade of failures throughout the rest of a network. In such cases, a simple bug in the system can impact everyone connected to the network.

How Will This Be Fixed?

Optus engineers will be actively investigating the cause of the outage. You might be imagining someone scurrying around with wires in their hands trying to find the one that isn’t plugged in – but in reality this will be a lengthy process that involves examining various systems and software configurations to find the culprit.

For Optus, the hard work will continue after the fix is in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again. And perhaps an even more difficult challenge will be convincing the public this was an isolated incident – one that has once again highlighted how vulnerable our massively connected systems are to (even single) points of failure.

Speaking on 3AW Afternoons, Bayer Rosmarin said:

We are looking at what we can do to say thank you to our customers for their patience.

Optus is likely to pay compensation to customers. For residential customers this may be in the form of a reduced bill.

For business customers, the compensation would be linked with their service-level agreements. In other words, the specific penalties for Optus will be based on individual agreements it has made with various parties using or sharing its services.

Beyond this, it’s highly likely today’s events have dealt a massive blow to Optus’s reputation – especially when considered alongside last year’s Optus data breach.

Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University; Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, RMIT University, and Mohiuddin Ahmed, Senior Lecturer of Computing and Security, Edith Cowan University

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

In a crisis, Optus appears to be ignoring Communications 101

Millions of Optus customers are in the wilderness of a nationwide network outage that began at 4am.

The initial response from Optus delivered by an unnamed company spokesperson on Facebook and X at 6.47am AEDT told Australians little they didn’t already know, that the network was down, and that the company didn’t yet know what had happened.

Later, at 10.30am, the ABC got through to Optus Chief Executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarino via WhatsApp and asked

What do you know? What’s happened?

Bayer Rosmarino replied:

Well I mean we do know how important connectivity is to all of our customers, so we are really, really apologetic and sorry that our connections have gone down today. The teams are working with huge effort to try and restore services as a priority, and will keep working on that until everybody’s back in action.

For the second time in a little over a year, the country’s second-largest telecommunications provider lost control of its story.

In September last year when the data of up to 9.8 million of its present and former customers was compromised, it failed to contact those affected for days and communicated via media statements, believing that was the “quickest and most effective way to alert as many current and former customers as possible”.

Golden Rules For Crises

Every company should have a crisis communications plan – a “living document” that it regularly updates, so that when a crisis emerges there is a strategy ready to be implemented.

There are several golden rules to executing an effective crisis communications response. They are based on transparency, honesty and empathy, and are well documented by theorists such as Timothy Coombs and William Benoit.

1. Learn From Past Mistakes

Last year Optus was castigated after its appalling public response (or lack thereof) to one of Australia’s largest data breaches. Optus took four days to tell 9.8 million present and former customers that their data had been compromised.

For a company in the communications business, that’s an epic failure.

To make matters worse, once alerted to the breach, its customers were unable to get through. In a crisis, customers don’t want a recorded message that tells them their “call is important” only to be left on hold.

At that moment customers need information and assurance their trust in the company has not been misplaced. If the company doesn’t have capacity it should be ready to mobilise a temporary workforce to respond to its customers.

2. Prepare To Deal With The Media

Another mistake Optus appeared to make last year was not to give Bayer Rosmarin sufficient media training. She didn’t front the media for two days.

Corporate heads and executives should regularly undergo media training during which they learn how to respond to difficult and hostile questioning.

This time Bayer Rosmarin fronted the media within hours rather than days, although too late for the morning news programs that told Australians what was going on.

3. Don’t Let The Story Run Away From You

The best advice is to get out in front of the story. By the time Bayer Rosmarin spoke up at 10.30 this morning, it was difficult to alter an established narrative.

Once a story becomes publicly established, it becomes difficult to influence.

And it is best to speak to more than one media outlet. This is particularly important for a company with a broad customer base like Optus.

4. Apologise And Accept Blame

Last year Optus painted itself as the victim of the hack (which it was) but then failed to also address its responsibility for keeping its customers’ data safe, and apologise for failing to do so.

Mortification (confessing and asking for forgiveness) is recommended by both Coombs and Benoit, and the sooner the better.

Companies that apologise late are seen as disingenuous.

5. Be Empathetic

Companies that have let down their customers should put themselves in their customers’ place.

Part of doing this is to avoid corporate speak and connect at a human level.

Customers want to know the company accepts its actions have caused harm and is as concerned about it as they are, if not more so.

This means sharing information as soon as it is to hand so that customers can make decisions. These might involve leaving for a competitor, or sticking with the company that is sticking by them.

6. Be Honest

If a company in crisis doesn’t know the answer to a question it should say so, but then promise to provide regular updates and be true to its word.

A company that leaves a communication vacuum (as Optus did this morning) will allow others to fill it, almost certainly to its detriment.

7. Bolster Your Company

Bolstering is reminding customers of the good things a company has done in the past, and can work when deployed alongside empathy, honesty and mortification.

It’s an approach that will prove difficult for Optus, given its performance the last time it was in this sort of crisis.

Alison Stieven-Taylor, Lecturer in Strategic Communications, Monash University

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

Only 1.5% of students swapped fields due to the ‘Job-ready Graduates’ fee changes

In January 2021, the Morrison government changed the way university fees are set with the Job-ready Graduates scheme.

The idea was to steer students into courses that would lead to “the jobs of the future”. So the scheme made some fields (such as history and journalism) more expensive and some (such as nursing, teaching, computer programming and engineering) less expensive.

Fees rose by as much as 117% for some fields and dropped by as much as 59% for others. The government believed this would affect student choices.

Education experts have been very critical of scheme. They argue it is not only unfair, it would not work. But to date there have been few studies looking at the evidence.

Our research with our former student Maxwell Yong shows the impact of the Job-ready Graduates scheme was modest at best.

Our Research

Our study looked at student’s preferences when applying for degrees and final enrolments (what they ended up studying).

We used data from the Universities Admissions Centre, which handles applications for degrees in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.

We looked at more than 725,000 undergraduates applying between 2014 and 2022. This means we had seven years of data before the Job-ready Graduates scheme was introduced, and two years afterwards.

Using various statistical models, we analysed whether students increased their preferences for fields that became cheaper and reduced preferences for fields that became more expensive.

Our Findings

Overall we found the Job-ready Graduates scheme only had a minor impact on course choices.

Just 1.52% of university applicants in our study chose fields they would have not chosen had it not been for the scheme, moving from humanities, arts, law and business to STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and teaching.

Maths and statistics had the largest drop of student fees (59%) of any field. But only one out of every 2,000 students responded by changing their preference to maths.

Communications, journalism and media studies had the largest increase in fees (117%). But only one out of every 350 students chose not to preference these fields in response.

This is perhaps not surprising. Under HECS-HELP, students do not have to pay university fees up-front. Many students also choose courses based on their passions and interests rather than the amount of the deferred fees.

Big Repercussions

While we found only modest responses to these large fee changes, this does not mean students are not affected. Because of the reforms, many will accumulate much larger HECS-HELP debts.

For a three-year bachelors degree in journalism, the debt grows from around A$20,000 to A$43,500. For a mathematics degree, the debt falls from around $28,600 to $11,850. The new difference in debts ($31,650) is more than triple the old difference ($8,600).

Higher debts mean more years of making repayments. Longer repayment times may mean delayed home purchases and starting families.

These reforms overturned 25 years of university fees reflecting the earning prospects of graduates. Those likely to earn more post-graduation (lawyers, doctors, financiers) paid a bit more. Those likely to earn less (arts, nursing, teaching) paid a bit less.

The Universities Accord

The Albanese government is in the middle of a broad review of the higher education system, including university fees. The Universities Accord review panel is due to hand in a final report in December.

An interim report was highly critical of the Job-ready Graduates scheme, saying it risks “causing long-term and entrenched damage to Australian higher education”.

As a new model is considered, it is important policymakers understand increasing HECS-HELP debts for some and reducing them for others is not going to prompt students into areas the government deems a “priority”. 

Jan Kabatek, Research Fellow, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne and Michael Coelli, Associate professor, The University of Melbourne

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

Kandinsky at the Art Gallery of New South Wales: a precious gem of a show celebrating the transformative power of art

Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a pioneer of abstract art. His work and theories on art profoundly influenced the School of Paris, the American Abstract Expressionists, as well as the expressionist painters working in Australia.

Drawing on the extensive holdings of the the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, this new exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is the largest Kandinsky exhibition to be held in Australia.

In about 50 works, it covers the full range of the artist’s vision: the early “folky” works carrying the impact of the Jugendstil (German art nouveau) and Impressionism; the groundbreaking abstracts with their impressions, improvisations and compositions; and finally the wonderful, refined late geometric and biomorphic paintings.

This is a precious gem of a show that celebrates the transformative power of art – its ability to transcend the material realm and to nourish us spiritually.

Russian Imagery, Spiritual Realm And Colour Auras

Kandinsky was Russian, born in Moscow in 1866. He never lost links with Russian art and culture. He expressed a profound belief in Russian Orthodoxy as the sole true faith.

Circumstances of history meant he divided his life between living and travelling in Russia and working in Germany and finally living in France, where he died.

Nevertheless, even when living in the heart of industrial Munich, he still painted Russian horse-drawn troikas, churches with their cupolas and the great saints of Russia.

Building on the heritage of spiritualism inherent in Russian Orthodox icons and the inventive whimsical narratives in Russian folk art, Kandinsky also explored the spiritual realm and colour auras integral to theosophy.

He was one of the most influential teachers at the German Bauhaus, before the Nazis closed it. He wrote the single most influential essay in 20th-century art, On the spiritual in art, in 1911.

What strikes me about this exhibition is Kandinsky has lost none of his timeless magic.

Frequently when visiting an exhibition of an early modern – for example, Picasso’s cubism – you may be impressed by the work and its avant-garde properties that were so amazing in their day, but they appear of their time and somewhat dated.

Kandinsky’s paintings have not aged and appear contemporary and relevant to us now.

Speaking Directly To The Soul

In Kandinsky’s early paintings, for example, Blue Mountain (1908-09) and Landscape with factory chimney (1910), the figurative element is still strong. Kandinsky invites the viewer to take a walk in the painting and explore an enchanted landscape.

Together with the theosophists, Kandinsky had a mistrust of science. At one stage he remarked:

The disintegration of the atom was to me like the disintegration of the whole world […] I should not have been surprised if a stone had melted in the air and become invisible before my eyes.

A mistrust of science was linked to a mistrust of the physical world observed through the senses and the desire to explore a spiritual reality that bypasses empirical observation and speaks directly to the soul.

Some of the great Kandinsky paintings, including Improvisation 28, second version (1912), Landscape with rain (1913) and the wonderful Painting with white border (May 1913), break free of the figurative realm and create their own reality.

Increasingly Kandinsky questioned the importance of the object as a necessary element in a painting and demonstrated a preparedness to embrace the power, fantasy and enchantment of the palette.

Colour for Kandinsky was a symbolic spiritual experience, with colours linked with spiritual states.

In Kandinsky’s work the physiological effect of colour is sensory and short-lived; warm colours like vermilion attract the eye; the bright yellow of a lemon is painful.

A psychological resonance is produced when the sensory impression causes an emotional vibration directly or through association: red is flame and blood, black a painful silence, the appeal of orange is like the sound of a church bell.

Writing about the Painting with white border, Kandinsky observed:

At that time, I tried, by lines and by distributing of patches of colour, to express the musical spirit of Russia.

One may see in the painting in the top-left-hand corner three black lines that relate to the horses of the Russian troika. In the centre is the lance of the Russian St George slaying the dragon that threatened his homeland with the impending war. Each element in the painting was the subject of a separate study and these studies inform us about the individual elements in the painting.

In a famous passage in On the spiritual in art, Kandinsky observed:

Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a piano of many strings […] [harmony rests] on the principle of innermost necessity.

Many of Kandinsky’s paintings in the 1920s and 1930s, including Blue segment (1921), Blue painting (January 1924) and Dominant curve (April 1936), refine some of the earlier more organic forms through geometric discipline to create great explorations of intuitive spiritual forms ambiguously suspended in space.

Kandinsky was a great innovator, a profound thinker and a superb painter and graphic artist. His vision changed the way we think about art. This outstanding landmark exhibition, for the first time, redefines his place in art for an Australian audience.

Kandinsky is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until March 10 2024.

Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

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

By reviewing the name of the Baden-Powell Award, Scouts Australia is grappling with its colonial past

Scouts Australia is considering changing the name of its most prestigious youth award, the Baden-Powell Scout Award.

Presented to recipients by the governor-general, this award is named after the movement’s founder, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, fondly known as B-P.

For millions, Baden-Powell remains a hero. For others, his role in creating the largest youth movement in history is overshadowed by allegations of colonial war crimes.

Like Macquarie University, the City of Sydney, and other institutions, Scouts is caught in an awkward gap between tradition and modernity, as society grapples with colonial figures who were heroes to some, but not others.

Adapting To Changing Social Values

Scouts is one of Australia’s largest youth organisations, with over 70,000 members.

Globally, the movement has 57 million members and volunteers across 174 national organisations.

Baden-Powell’s handbook, Scouting for Boys, is the fourth best-selling book of the 20th century.

The movement began in 1907 after Baden-Powell coordinated a camp on Brownsea Island, England. Baden-Powell’s Scouting philosophy emphasised social responsibility and outdoor skills. The movement became a global sensation, arriving in Australia in 1908.

Notwithstanding its positive influence in fostering youth life skills, the early Scouting movement arguably sometimes operated as an agent of British colonialism. In the early 20th century, it spread across distant outposts of the British Empire, where it encouraged imperial loyalty.

Scouting has endured for over a century, in part because of its willingness to adapt to changing social values.

In 1973, Scouts Australia first admitted women. In 2018, Scouts Australia altered the wording of the Scout Promise.

Now, a Scout can decide between swearing to “do their duty” to their king or queen, or their community and world, and can pledge to their “spiritual beliefs” or “their God”.

But Back To Baden-Powell

Scouts Australia is “reviewing the appropriateness of the Baden-Powell Scout Award name”.

In part, this has been prompted by overseas events. In 2020, amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a statue of Baden-Powell in England appeared on a “Topple the Racists” hit list.

Yet, the statue was defended by local Scouts, and a petition against its removal received over 40,500 signatures.

Controversy around Baden-Powell stems from allegations he held antisemitic and racist attitudes.

In 2010, declassified M15 files showed Baden-Powell had been invited to meet Adolf Hitler to build closer ties between Scouts and Hitler’s youth organisation.

Historians have since argued Baden-Powell has been incorrectly framed as a Nazi sympathiser. The meeting never eventuated, and Scouting was banned in Germany, with Baden-Powell being placed on a Nazi death list.

Before Scouts, Baden-Powell was already a hero of the British Empire for his efforts during the South African War.

This conflict claimed the lives of thousands of Black Africans. As an army officer, Baden-Powell famously defended the town of Mafeking, becoming an overnight hero to the British.

Yet, Baden-Powell has since been accused of war crimes against local Africans, including unlawful executions and contributing to starvation. Historians contest the extent to which Baden-Powell ought to be blamed.

Regardless, as an agent of empire, Baden-Powell cannot be extricated from the legacy of British colonialism in Africa. Globally, Scouts has recognised this, with the Chief Scout of the UK, Bear Grylls, admitting Baden-Powell’s “failings”.

An Extended Process Of Public Reckoning

Scouts is just one of many organisations forced to reckon with their colonial baggage.

Often, colonial origin stories are commemorated through the names of places or institutions.

Anyone driving across Australia today will still see reminders of our colonial past in racist naming practices that glorify certain legacies over others, or spread a distorted version of history. The case to replace obviously racist place names can be uncontroversial, provided consultation takes place with Traditional Owners.

In recent years, Queensland has revoked certain racist place names, while Tasmania has renamed several places that previously commemorated colonial violence.

However, some cases can become fraught.

Examples include the many entities that derive their name from Lachlan Macquarie, who served as New South Wales governor from 1810 to 1821. He has been celebrated as a humanitarian, yet Macquarie terrorised local Indigenous peoples.

His military carried out the Appin Massacre of 1816. Macquarie ordered the victims’ bodies to be strung from trees as a warning against further resistance.

Today, Macquarie’s legacy is increasingly disputed. This year, a statue of Macquarie was defaced, with graffiti exposing his record of violence.

Even Macquarie University is facing calls to recognise his ambiguous legacy, rather than promoting him.

In Hyde Park, a plaque beneath a statue of Macquarie describes him as “a perfect gentleman”.

Yet the City of Sydney has recently announced a review of 25 colonial statues, with an aim to include new signage that presents a fuller picture of history.

This is likely to be the start of an extended process of public reckoning. This may extend from relatively unknown statues, or place names, to big businesses and institutions with connections to questionable legacies.

Ciara Smart, PhD candidate in Australasian Colonial History, University of Tasmania

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

Frontotemporal dementia: we discovered a brain fold that may delay onset of symptoms

Few people had probably heard of frontotemporal dementia until earlier this year, when the family of actor Bruce Willis announced the 68-year-old had been diagnosed with the condition.

Frontotemporal dementia is a rare disease – thought to account for only one in every 20 cases of dementia. Symptoms usually develop in a person’s late 50s, first affecting their behaviour, personality and language ability. Unlike other forms of dementia, memory only becomes impaired in the late stages of the disease.

People diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia usually die within eight years of their diagnosis. While around 30% of cases are inherited, the cause of frontotemporal dementia is largely unknown. This also means there are no cures available or treatments to slow its progression.

But recent research, I have published with colleagues at Lund University, may have brought us one step closer in our understanding of how frontotemporal dementia develops and progresses. We discovered that the way your brain looks may determine your resilience to the condition.

Brain Folds

During pregnancy, as a foetus’s brain grows within the womb, it develops its distinctive folds while expanding within the skull. These brain folds play an important role in our later cognitive function.

The folds that form early in foetal development are found in both sides of the brain in every person. But there’s one fold that sometimes develops later on in the process. It’s called the paracingulate sulcus – and not everyone has it. In those that do have it, it can either be present on just one side of the brain or both sides.

The paracingulate sulcus is interesting, as its presence can make a significant difference to cognitive ability. For example, research has shown that people with a left but not a right paracingulate sulcus have a cognitive advantage – performing better on tasks involving control and even memory.

Given the link between the paracingulate sulcus and cognitive function, our research team at Lund University – alongside colleagues in the US and Amsterdam – began studying this brain fold’s role in dementia.

To really understand what role the paracingulate sulcus plays, the team decided to focus on a type of dementia where brain damage occurs in the same region as this brain fold. The obvious choice for this research was frontotemporal dementia. This aggressive form of early-onset dementia primarily attacks the frontal lobes of the brain – particularly the central portions surrounding the paracingulate sulcus.

Our team studied MRI brain images of 186 people who had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. We excluded participants who had frontotemporal dementia with a genetic cause. Around 57% of participants had a paracingulate sulcus on the right side of their brain.

We discovered that in participants who had this extra fold on the right side of their brain, their dementia symptoms began on average two and a half years later. This might mean that the paracingulate sulcus may delay the onset of symptoms. These findings were statistically significant – showing they weren’t due to chance or other factors.

This two-and-a-half-year delay in symptoms may not sound like much, but considering the poor prognosis of the condition and the burden of symptoms, this is an extremely meaningful amount of time for patients and their relatives.

Cognitive Reserve

That said, after the symptoms do begin, patients with this extra brain fold became sicker at a faster rate and survived for a shorter length of time than patients who do not have the fold. So despite the delay in symptoms, patients with and without this extra brain fold still died at a similar age.

Although it may sound strange that a factor can both delay symptoms and later speed them up, this paradox is a key feature of a principle referred to in neuroscience as “brain reserve”. Brain reserve describes a structure in the brain which provides resilience to a disease before symptoms develop.

Critically, there becomes a point at which the disease overcomes these protective mechanisms, and the patient develops symptoms. After this critical point, people with high brain reserve decline rapidly – faster than people with low brain reserve.

For example, high brain reserve explains why Alzheimer’s disease starts later in highly educated people – though the disease progresses faster for them when symptoms start. According to our research, the paracingulate sulcus operates by a similar principle – first protecting people from symptoms, then progressing rapidly when symptoms do start.

Our research is the first to identify a protective structure in the brain which delays the onset of symptoms in people with frontotemporal dementia. If we can now uncover a way of preserving this protective quality, it could lead to the development of treatments which can help keep symptoms – and the disease – at bay.

Luke Harper, PhD Student. Neurologist, Lund University

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

How much protein do I need as I get older? And do I need supplements to get enough?

If you are a woman around 50, you might have seen advice on social media or from influencers telling you protein requirements increase dramatically in midlife. Such recommendations suggest a 70 kilogram woman needs around 150 grams of protein each day. That’s the equivalent of 25 boiled eggs at 6 grams of protein each.

Can that be right? Firstly let’s have a look at what protein is and where you get it.

Protein is an essential macro-nutrient in our diet. It provides us with energy and is used to repair and make muscle, bones, soft tissues and hormones and enzymes. Mostly we associate animal foods (dairy, meat and eggs) as being rich in protein. Plant foods such as bread, grains and legumes provide valuable sources of protein too.

But what happens to our requirements as we get older?

Ages And Stages

Protein requirements change through different life stages. This reflects changes in growth, especially from babies through to young adulthood. The estimated average requirements by age are:

• 1.43g protein per kg of body weight at birth

• 1.6g per kg of body weight at 6–12 months (when protein requirements are at their highest point)

• protein needs decline from 0.92g down to 0.62g per kg of body weight from 6–18 years.

When we reach adulthood, protein requirements differ for men and women, which reflects the higher muscle mass in men compared to women:

• 0.68g per kg of body weight for men

• 0.6g per kg of body weight for women.

Australian recommendations for people over 70 reflect the increased need for tissue repair and muscle maintenance:

• 0.86g per kg of bodyweight for men

• 0.75g per kg of bodyweight for women.

For a 70kg man this is a difference of 12.6g/protein per day. For a 70kg woman this is an increase of 10.5g per day. You can add 10g of protein by consuming an extra 300ml milk, 60g cheese, 35g chicken, 140g lentils, or 3–4 slices of bread.

There is emerging evidence higher intakes for people over 70 (up to 0.94–1.3g per kg of bodyweight per day) might reduce age-related decline in muscle mass (known as sarcopenia). But this must be accompanied with increased resistance-based exercise, such as using weights or stretchy bands. As yet these have not been included in any national nutrient guidelines.

But What About In Midlife?

So, part of a push for higher protein in midlife might be due to wanting to prevent age-related muscle loss. And it might also be part of a common desire to prevent weight gain that may come with hormonal changes.

There have been relatively few studies specifically looking at protein intake in middle-aged women. One large 2017 observational study (where researchers look for patterns in a population sample) of over 85,000 middle-aged nurses found higher intake of vegetable protein – but not animal protein or total protein – was linked to a lower incidence of early menopause.

In the same group of women another study found higher intake of vegetable protein was linked to a lower risk of frailty (meaning a lower risk of falls, disability, hospitalisation and death). Higher intake of animal protein was linked to higher risk of frailty, but total intake of protein had no impact.

Another smaller observational study of 103 postmenopausal women found higher lean muscle mass in middle-aged women with higher protein intake. Yet an intervention study (where researchers test out a specific change) showed no effect of higher protein intake on lean body mass in late post-menopasual women.

Some researchers are theorising that higher dietary protein intake, along with a reduction in kilojoules, could reduce weight gain in menopause. But this has not been tested in clinical trials.

Increasing protein intake, improves satiety (feeling full), which may be responsible for reducing body weight and maintaining muscle mass. The protein intake to improve satiety in studies has been about 1.0–1.6g per kg of bodyweight per day. However such studies have not been specific to middle-aged women, but across all ages and in both men and women.

What Are We Actually Eating?

If we look at what the average daily intake of protein is, we can see 99% of Australians under the age of 70 meet their protein requirements from food. So most adults won’t need supplements.

Only 14% of men over 70 and 4% of women over 70 do not meet their estimated average protein requirements. This could be for many reasons, including a decline in overall health or an illness or injury which leads to reduced appetite, reduced ability to prepare foods for themselves and also the cost of animal sources of protein.

While they may benefit from increased protein from supplements, opting for a food-first approach is preferable. As well as being more familiar and delicious, it comes with other essential nutrients. For example, red meat also has iron and zinc in it, fish has omega-3 fats, and eggs have vitamin A and D, some iron and omega-3 fats and dairy has calcium.

So What Should I Do?

Symptoms of protein deficiency include muscle wasting, poor wound healing, oedema (fluid build-up) and anaemia (when blood doesn’t provide enough oxygen to cells). But the amount of protein in the average Australian diet means deficiency is rare. The Australian dietary guidelines provide information on the number of serves you need from each food group to achieve a balanced diet that will meet your nutrient requirements.

If you are concerned about your protein intake due to poor health, increased demand because of the sports you’re doing or because you are a vegan or vegetarian, talk to your GP or an accredited practising dietitian.

Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia

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

The Great Escaper: Michael Caine’s final film is Britain’s answer to Saving Private Ryan

The Great Escaper is an engaging exploration of love, loss, memory and trauma. It’s also the final film for its star, Michael Caine, as he has recently announced his retirement. The film tells the real story of Royal Navy veteran, Bernard Jordan, who “escaped” from his care home in June 2014 to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day commemorations in Normandy.

The film follows Caine’s “Bernie” as he embarks upon a deeply personal and emotional reckoning with his war, a journey he undertakes with the support of his stoic wife, Irene, beautifully played by the late Glenda Jackson.

The Great Escaper uses a well-known storytelling device: the war-damaged veteran. In doing so, it marks itself as a British answer to Saving Private Ryan (1998). The film, which pays homage to the war generation, revels in forties nostalgia and stakes an assertive British claim to the memory of the Allied invasion.

Troubled Homecomings

From the troubled homecoming of Homer’s Odysseus to the spate of Hollywood films produced in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the angry and alienated Vietnam veteran such as The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), the traumatised ex-soldier has long been a figure of cultural interest. This has especially been the case in the British film industry over the last 30 years.

Take, for instance, a trilogy of films produced in the late 1980s all of which examined the return to “civvy street” of battle-damaged Falklands veterans: Resurrected (1989), Tumbledown (1988) and For Queen and Country (1989). Or, more recent productions focused on returning soldiers, such as Outlaw (2007), The Veteran (2011) and, of course, Harry Brown (2009).

The latter starred Michael Caine as a decorated Royal Marine veteran who sets out to rid his impoverished inner-city council estate of crime.

Caine’s “Bernie” is clearly a very different figure to Harry Brown (he does nothing more controversial than letting down the tyres of antisocial cyclists). But as a film character, he nonetheless owes something to these cinematic counterparts. Like them, he carries the psychological scars of war, scars which wake him in the night and which take him back to the invasion beaches on the Normandy coast.

D-Day On Film

The Normandy invasion has been subject of various films, perhaps most famously The Longest Day (1962). In the modern era, however, the D-Day film of most renown is undoubtedly Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), which starred Tom Hanks and Matt Damon.

Intended as a homage to the “greatest generation”, the film begins with an old soldier (the titular Private Ryan) searching the graves in the vast American military cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy. This was the scene of some of the deadliest fighting on June 6 1944.

Finding the grave he is looking for, the aged veteran drops to his knees before the camera zooms in on his eyes so that Spielberg can take us back to the battle on that grey spring morning. It is a powerful scene, and it has clearly inspired The Great Escaper’s director, Oliver Parker.

Indeed, the shadow of Saving Private Ryan looms large throughout. Like Spielberg, Parker takes us back to a Normandy burial ground, this time the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery in the town of Bayeux. He has us wander among the serried ranks of headstones and, via a series of flashbacks, we witness the carnage on the coast in washed-out colour, with the salt and sea spray in our eyes.

These similarities, I think, reveal the ultimate point of The Great Escaper. Through the familiar trope of a war-damaged British veteran, the films pays homage to those who fought and won the second world war. It’s a generation much vaunted in recent years, especially amid all the Brexit-induced forties nostalgia.

In doing so, Caine’s filmic finale also delivers an assertive British claim on the memory of D-Day (complete with obligatory digs at the “lateness” to the conflict of the American ally). In effect, it is the cinematic counterpart to the new British Normandy War Memorial, unveiled just two years ago in June 2021.

Whether or not Parker’s film goes on to have the same cultural impact as Spielberg’s award-winning production remains to be seen. But thanks to the powerful presence of Michael Caine it surely stands a decent chance.

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Sam Edwards, Reader in Modern Political History, Loughborough University

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

Do you trust AI to write the news? It already is – and not without issues

Businesses are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate media content, including news, to engage their customers. Now, we’re even seeing AI used for the “gamification” of news – that is, to create interactivity associated with news content.

For better or worse, AI is changing the nature of news media. And we’ll have to wise up if we want to protect the integrity of this institution.

How Did She Die?

Imagine you’re reading a tragic article about the death of a young sports coach at a prestigious Sydney school.

In a box to the right is a poll asking you to speculate about the cause of death. The poll is AI-generated. It’s designed to keep you engaged with the story, as this will make you more likely to respond to advertisements provided by the poll’s operator.

This scenario isn’t hypothetical. It was played out in The Guardian’s recent reporting on the death of Lilie James.

Under a licensing agreement, Microsoft republished The Guardian’s story on its news app and website Microsoft Start. The poll was based on the content of the article and displayed alongside it, but The Guardian had no involvement or control over it.

If the article had been about an upcoming sports fixture, a poll on the likely outcome would have been harmless. Yet this example shows how problematic it can be when AI starts to mingle with news pages, a product traditionally curated by experts.

The incident led to reasonable anger. In a letter to Microsoft president Brad Smith, Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson said it was “an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI]”, which caused “significant reputational damage” to The Guardian and the journalist who wrote the story.

Naturally, the poll was removed. But it raises the question: why did Microsoft let it happen in the first place?

The Consequence Of Omitting Common Sense

The first part of the answer is that supplementary news products such as polls and quizzes actually do engage readers, as research by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas has found.

Given how cheap it is to use AI for this purpose, it seems likely news businesses (and businesses displaying others’ news) will continue to do so.

The second part of the answer is there was no “human in the loop”, or limited human involvement, in the Microsoft incident.

The major providers of large language models – the models that underpin various AI programs – have a financial and reputational incentive to make sure their programs don’t cause harm. Open AI with its GPT- models and DAll-E, Google with PaLM 2 (used in Bard), and Meta with its downloadable Llama 2 have all made significant efforts to ensure their models don’t generate harmful content.

They often do this through a process called “reinforcement learning”, where humans curate responses to questions that might lead to harm. But this doesn’t always prevent the models from producing inappropriate content.

It’s likely Microsoft was relying on the low-harm aspects of its AI, rather than considering how to minimise harm that may arise through the actual use of the model. The latter requires common sense – a trait that can’t be programmed into large language models.

Thousands Of AI-Generated Articles Per Week

Generative AI is becoming accessible and affordable. This makes it attractive to commercial news businesses, which have been reeling from losses of revenue. As such, we’re now seeing AI “write” news stories, saving companies from having to pay journalist salaries.

In June, News Corp executive chair Michael Miller revealed the company had a small team that produced about 3,000 articles a week using AI.

Essentially, the team of four ensures the content makes sense and doesn’t include “hallucinations”: false information made up by a model when it can’t predict a suitable response to an input.

While this news is likely to be accurate, the same tools can be used to generate potentially misleading content parading as news, and nearly indistinguishable from articles written by professional journalists.

Since April, a NewsGuard investigation has found hundreds of websites, written in several languages, that are mostly or entirely generated by AI to mimic real news sites. Some of these included harmful misinformation, such as the claim that US President Joe Biden had died.

It’s thought the sites, which were teeming with ads, were likely generated to get ad revenue.

As Technology Advances, So Does Risk

Generally, many large language models have been limited by their underlying training data. For instance, models trained on data up to 2021 will not provide accurate “news” about the world’s events in 2022.

However, this is changing, as models can now be fine-tuned to respond to particular sources. In recent months, the use of an AI framework called “retrieval augmented generation” has evolved to allow models to use very recent data.

With this method, it would certainly be possible to use licensed content from a small number of news wires to create a news website.

While this may be convenient from a business standpoint, it’s yet one more potential way that AI could push humans out of the loop in the process of news creation and dissemination.

An editorially curated news page is a valuable and well-thought-out product. Leaving AI to do this work could expose us to all kinds of misinformation and bias (especially without human oversight), or result in a lack of important localised coverage.

Cutting Corners Could Make Us All Losers

Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code was designed to “level the playing field” between big tech and media businesses. Since the code came into effect, a secondary change is now flowing in from the use of generative AI.

Putting aside click-worthiness, there’s currently no comparison between the quality of news a journalist can produce and what AI can produce.

While generative AI could help augment the work of journalists, such as by helping them sort through large amounts of content, we have a lot to lose if we start to view it as a replacement.

Rob Nicholls, Associate professor of regulation and governance, UNSW Sydney

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

A new Silicon Valley manifesto reveals the bleak, dangerous philosophy driving the tech industry

In 1993, Marc Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also worked at the US-government funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications. With a colleague, the young software engineer authored the Mosaic web browser, which set the standard for cruising the information superhighway in the 1990s.

Andreessen went on to cofound Netscape Communications, making a fortune in 1999 when the company was acquired by AOL for US$4.3 billion.

Since then, through his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the outspoken billionaire has become one of the most influential wallets in Silicon Valley. His investments – in companies including Facebook, Foursquare, Github, Lyft, Oculus and Twitter – have definitively shaped tech over the past 15 years. (He once described his approach as “funding imperial, will-to-power people”.)

Because of all this, it’s worth paying attention to Andreessen’s recent “techno-optimist manifesto”. Opening with the claim that “we are being lied to”, the lengthy blog post takes in a section on “becoming technological supermen”, musings on the meaning of life, and a long list of enemies. It offers a revealing glimpse into the philosophy of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, where more technology is the only way forward – and a warning about the kind of world they’re trying to build.

Tech Utopia Gone Sour

Since Silicon Valley’s birth in the 1960s, its promoters have held utopian ideas about technology, from the “new communalism” of Stewart Brand to the cyber-libertarianism of Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow. In the 1990s, supporters of this “Californian ideology” saw the rise of the Internet as proof of the growing importance of technology (and the diminishing power of governments).

Andreessen’s essay shows what these ideals have become in 2023. The political and economic worldview beneath its ideas about technology is most visible towards the end of the manifesto, in a list of “enemies”.

Remarkably, these include “sustainability”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics” and “social responsibility”. According to Andreessen, who describes himself as an “accelerationist”, such ideas are holding back the advance of technology and therefore human progress.

Although the manifesto purports to believe in democracy, what Andreessen really argues for is a kind of technocracy based on “economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength”.

This is a vision of dominance. By proposing to abolish concern with ethics and the environment, for example, individuals like Andreessen can have free rein to develop, promote and profit from their inventions (including those funded by taxpayers) without interference.

A Colonial Vision

We don’t have to look too deeply into history to find parallels to this kind of worldview. Simply put, it is the worldview of colonialism: it sees both nature and other people as domains to be conquered and exploited for “growth”.

Andreessen describes his mission in explicitly colonial terms: “mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community”. This is a worldview in which territories must be constantly expanded (“our descendants will live in the stars”) in a perpetual war for supremacy.

Technology has played an instrumental role in colonial conquest. Anthropologist Jared Diamond’s famous “guns, germs, and steel” were all technologies vital to the European conquest of the Americas. We might add to this list ships (including slave ships), navigation instruments, telegraphs, and so on.

Even the technologies of the industrial revolution – so important to the narrative of technological progress imagined by Andreessen and his ilk – were enabled by the availability and exploitation of cheap labour and markets in the Global South.

The mission of techno-optimists appears to be to pick up where the European and American empires of the 19th century left off, using technological, political and economic power to bully, coerce and bludgeon other societies into acquiescence.

For Andreessen, all this is supported, like colonialism, by a kind of social Darwinism. He sees an evolutionary war in which “smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure”.

Andreessen writes “technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof”. However, his talk of “America and her allies” and “our civilisation” suggests Andreessen himself cares quite a bit about these things. The West should, he implies, embrace its rightful place as the world’s technological (and civilisational) leader.

A Warning

All this reveals some of what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs really think of the rest of the world, and of us (non-techno-optimists).

We should take it as a warning about the kind of world that Silicon Valley technologists want. It will be a world built with technology, yes, but also a world that values power, force and wealth over all else.

Andreessen is right about one thing: we do need technology. We are unlikely to solve many of the problems facing our planet without it.

But the stripped-down, raw, blunt version of technology – a technology without ethics, without values, and without a conscience – is not the only way. Instead, we need to support technological innovation and at the same time support democratic participation, pluralism, ethics and our natural environment.

Hallam Stevens, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University

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

Almost 2 million Workforce Australia payments have been suspended in the past year, with devastating impact

Last year the federal government replaced the jobactive employment support program with what was expected to be a more flexible and improved support system for jobseekers, Workforce Australia.

Yet, in the 16 months the contracted-out system has been running, almost 2 million income support payments have been suspended, affecting 70% of participants.

Under the new system, participants must meet a points target to receive payments.

For example, if the default points target is 100 per month, this can be met by a minimum of four job applications (worth 5 points each) and a mix of other activities. Points targets are adjusted to 60 per month for parents and people with disabilities.

Why Are Payments Suspended?

Payment suspensions are supposed to get people to comply with requirements such as attending job interviews and undertaking training, education classes or other activities to reach their points target.

When these criteria are not met, participants are given a two-day grace period to resolve the problem, after which payments are automatically suspended. The suspension remains until the target is met or the suspension is lifted by a job service provider. The average suspension period is four days.

The figure of almost 2 million payment suspensions, cited at a Senate Estimates committee meeting last month, showed they have been occurring at an alarming rate since Workforce Australia started.

Committee member and Greens senator Janet Rice highlighted concern about the high suspension rate and representatives from the Department of Employment, which runs the program, agreed it was an issue.

If 70% of participants have been suspended, that makes it very likely some people have lost payments multiple times. These people might be long-term unemployed due to health, disability or discrimination in the workplace.

Suspending payments to these already disadvantaged groups has a devastating impact because income support payments are grossly inadequate. The single person rate of JobSeeker payment is only $749.20 per fortnight, and the maximum rate of Commonwealth rent assistance is $101.07, adding up to $860.27 a fortnight.

Meanwhile an average share house rent in a capital city like Melbourne is $446 per fortnight - with single renters often paying double - and this leaves people without much room for delays to their income support payments.

The Damage Caused By Suspending Payments

Research into the impact of payment suspensions on people’s mental health shows the consequences are dire.

This is especially so during the current cost-of-living crisis when people have enough to worry about just paying rent, buying food or keeping a car on the road.

The harm caused by suspending payments is apparent in my recent analysis of the individual submissions to the parliamentary inquiry into Workforce Australia.

I coded the frequency of words relating to poor psychological wellbeing as represented in the table. Of the 69 submissions reviewed, 52 identified how payment suspensions caused high levels of stress and affected trust of the job service provider.

The word-frequency results show threats to payments have a devastating effect on the mental health of people receiving unemployment payments. Many felt bullied by their job services providers.

The impact of suspensions is reflected in this quote from one of the submissions. As one 53-year-old woman said in her submission:

I would ask you to consider and recognise that those of us who are reliant on this system are deprived of any means to control our circumstances. A system failure, a missed phone call, a misunderstanding or a simple lack of communication can lead to a suspension of payments.

The stress associated with being constantly under threat by the whims of a particular person, system faults or even a missed phone call is immeasurable. That I might be unable to eat, go to the doctor, pay for medication, buy petrol, pay bills on time (so as not to incur further costs), pay for internet/phone … is considerable and has a massive impact for those of us who are living under these unfortunate circumstances.

It effects our physical and emotional health, our ability to participate in our communities, our sense of future and diminishes our sense of self-worth and our accomplishments – reducing them to meaninglessness while keeping us in poverty.

Why Is The Suspension Rate So High?

The suspension rate is high because the criteria people must meet to receive payments are unrealistic, and because job service providers make mistakes.

Some people can’t meet targets or report points under the points model on time, or don’t attend appointments because they’ve been given insufficient notice or the appointments have been scheduled at times they are already working or in training.

In a speech last month, Labor MP Julian Hill, who heads the parliamentary inquiry into Workforce Australia, told a conference the powers of the system’s providers to make decisions affecting payments was a “major false economy”.

This “false economy” of payment suspensions has been a fixture of job services requirements for nearly two decades.

Workforce Australia was meant to have addressed this with the points model. Instead, the points reporting is onerous and there is no evidence it improves the employment prospects of people who have been struggling to find work.

The Next Steps

When the parliamentary inquiry into Workforce Australia submits its report this month, it is likely to recommend big changes including returning and payment suspension decisions to the government’s former Human Services department, Services Australia.

If that happens, it will be vital to move swiftly.

As was the case with the former government’s highly discredited and unlawful automated debt assessment and recovery system, Robodebt, the widespread use of payment suspensions is unfair and causes acute distress to people already surviving on inadequate income support.

Simone Casey, Research Associate, Centre for People, Organisation and Work, RMIT University

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

Do racehorses even know they’re ‘racing’ each other? It’s unlikely

When racing season arrives, everyone becomes an expert on the horses that are the stars of the spectacle.

TV personalities, professional pundits and form guides talk confidently about the favourite’s “will to win”. In close races, the equine contestants “battle it out”, demonstrating “heart”, “grit” and “determination”.

But do horses even know they are in a race, let alone have a desire to win it? Do they understand what it means when their nose is the first one to pass the post?

Based on decades of experience and everything we know about horse behaviour, I think the most plausible answer is “no”.

From The Horse’s Perspective

From a horse’s perspective, there are few intrinsic rewards for winning a race.

Reaching the end might mean relief from the pressure to keep galloping at high speed and hits from the jockey’s whip, but the same is true for all the horses once they pass the finishing post. If the race is close, the horse that eventually wins might even be whipped more often in the final stages than horses further back in the field.

So while being first to reach the winning post can be crucially important to the horse’s human connections, there is very little direct, intrinsic benefit to the horse that would motivate it to voluntarily gallop faster to achieve this outcome.

So does a horse even know it’s in a race? Again, the answer is likely “no”.

Running (cantering or galloping) is a quintessential horse behaviour and horses voluntarily run together in groups when given the opportunity – even in races without jockeys. However, there are a number of reasons to think horses have not evolved a desire to “win” during a group gallop.

Horses are social animals. In the wild, to minimise their individual exposure to predators, they synchronise their movement with other horses in their group.

This synchronisation includes maintaining similar speeds to other group members (to keep the group together), being alert to the positions of their own body and their neighbours’ to avoid collisions, and adapting their speed to the terrain and environmental cues that indicate upcoming danger or obstacles. In the wild, “winning” – that is, arriving first, long before other group members – could even be a negative, exposing the “winner” to an increased risk of predation.

This collective behaviour is the opposite of what owners, trainers and punters want from horses during a race.

The Horse’s Preferences (And How Riders Override Them)

Horse races depend on two horse-related factors: the horse’s innate tendency to synchronise with other horses, and its ability to be trained to ignore these tendencies in response to cues from the jockey during a race.

Trainers and jockeys also harness the preferences of individual horses. Some horses are averse to bunching up with others during the race, so jockeys let them move to the front of the field (these are “front runners”). Other horses seek the security of the group, so jockeys let them remain in the bunch until closer to the winning post (these are “come-from-behind” winners).

Jockeys use several different interventions to override the horse’s innate tendency to synchronise. These might include:

• directing the horses to travel much closer to the other horses (risking the sometimes fatal injuries we sometimes see at the track)

• travelling at speeds not of the horse’s choosing (usually at far higher speeds and for longer durations, and often maintained by use of the whip)

• preventing the horse from changing course to adapt its position relative to other horses in the field (directing its path via pressure on the mouth from the bit or taps from the whip).

During the early stages of a race, jockeys rely on horses’ innate desire to remain with the group to ensure they maintain the physical effort required to keep in touch with the front runners. This tendency may then be overruled so the horse will act independently of the group, leave it behind and come to the front to hopefully win.

No Concept Of Being In A Race

So horses most likely have no concept of being in a “race”, where the goal of their galloping is to get to a certain location on the track before any of the other horses. However, they undoubtedly know what it’s like to be in a race. That is, they learn through prior experience and training what is likely to happen and what to do during a race.

And with jockeys and trainers who understand the individual preferences of their horses to maximise their chances during the race, there will always be one horse that reaches that part of the track designated the winning post before the other horses in the group.

But as for winning horses understanding they are there to “win”? It’s far more likely it is the combination of natural ability, physical fitness and jockey skill that accounts for which horse wins, rather than any innate desire by that horse to get to the winning post before the other horses.

Cathrynne Henshall, Lecturer, School of Agricultural, Environmental and Veterinary Sciences, Charles Sturt University

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

The climate crisis is making gender inequality in developing coastal communities worse

Across the world, women and men experience the impacts of the climate crisis in different ways. These are shaped by societal roles and responsibilities and result in widening inequalities between men and women.

Sea-level rise, storm surges and high waves in coastal area do not discriminate, but societal structures often do. This makes climate change a highly gender-sensitive issue.

Research has long shown that coastal areas are the most directly affected by climate change. Small islands in Asia, central and South America and Africa – what many term “the global south” – are particularly vulnerable to land erosion and economic decline, amid livelihood losses in fisheries.

My doctoral research explores how in countries where women and girls already face disproportionate inequalities relating to ethnicity, class, age and education, the climate crisis is making things worse. In coastal areas, in particular, women and girls are ever more vulnerable.

Livelihoods Under Threat

In 2017, in collaboration with the Indonesian Feminist Journal, I conducted research off the coast of Demak in Java, Indonesia. I found that women in coastal communities faced multiple problems, from poverty and domestic and gender-based violence to employment challenges.

Fisherwomen who work at sea are having to sail further out and contend with difficult conditions to find catches. One woman, Zarokah, I interviewed had started fishing with her husband, two years earlier, when he could no longer find a crew to work with. They wake at 3am to head out to sea.

She told me a basket of tiny flying fish goes for 150,000 rupiah (£7.70) and a good haul will yield several baskets. But even when they don’t catch anything, they still have to cover the cost of supplies and equipment. This income is inadequate when faced with a situation where fish are becoming scarcer and extreme weather prevents them from going out to sea.

I have shown how women in this area and beyond have contributed significantly to the fishing sector and coastal economies. And yet, Masnu'ah, who is the founder of a local fisherwomen’s organisation, told me that women’s economic role continues to not be recognised by their male peers and society more broadly.

Zarokah is still labelled a “housewife” on her ID card, despite the fact that, as she put it, “If I don’t go, my husband doesn’t go either and we cannot meet our needs.”

If the fisherwomen do not receive recognition for their work, they are unable to access social protections including life insurance. As climate change increasingly threatens the profession at large, having state support and insurance is vital.

Access To Amenities And Healthcare

It’s not just women’s livelihoods in this area that are impacted by extreme weather and any other disruptions to the fishing industry. Tidal flooding has also made it difficult for women and girls to access healthcare facilities.

Women find it difficult to access clinics because the roads are closed and isolated. One activist in Demak told me about helping a woman give birth in the middle of a tidal flood – when the houses were sinking. “It was very difficult,” she said, “because the waves were high, there were no boats. The baby died two to three days after.”

Research from other regions in the world show a similar pattern of increasing vulnerability. In the south-western coastal region of Bangladesh, natural hazards, including storm surges and cyclones, have long affected women significantly. Of the 140,000 people killed in the 1991 cyclone disaster, 90% were women.

However, the impacts are broader than that. A recent study looked at women’s lives, particularly among the ethnic Munda community, in the Khulna, Satkhira and Bagerhat districts. It found that bad management of open-water sources (ponds and canals) has led to high water salinity. Women and girls, who are responsible for family provisions, have to walk up to 3km – and sometimes as far as 5km – to find drinking water.

They spend long hours carrying heavy water pots, which leads to chronic pain conditions. During droughts, this task can take over three hours daily. The women and girls also face harassment from boys and men while collecting the water.

A 2020 study in Ilaje, a coastal region in Nigeria, found that, there too, women and girls often bear the responsibility of ensuring there’s enough food, fuel and clean water available at home. During times of low rainfall or drought, they have to cover similarly long distances. Young girls sometimes have to leave school in order to help their mothers with these tasks.

Pregnant women in Ilaje, particularly, are vulnerable to health effects like malnutrition, dehydration, anemia, and other health risks related to low food and water availability during crises.

Due to prevailing patriarchal norms, Ilaje women lack the authority to make independent decisions within their families and in society. They don’t have control over financial matters and assets. And they are not given opportunities to participate in public spaces, in particular within community group discussions on climate change adaptation. As a result, they are unable to voice their specific concerns and needs – at both family and community levels.

Oceans and coastal ecosystems cover over two thirds of the planet. They play a crucial role in food and energy production as well as creating employment opportunities. About 600 million people – around 10% of the world’s population – reside in coastal areas that are less than 10 metres above sea level.

The central tenet of the UN’s 2030 agenda for sustainable development is to “leave no one behind”. Applying a feminist political lens to the climate crisis is crucial to understanding how multilayered the problems facing women and girls in rural and coastal regions around the world are.

Yet, social and feminist research on how the climate is changing has been scarce. Without it, women and girls will indeed be left behind.

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Andi Misbahul Pratiwi, PhD Candidate, School of Geography, University of Leeds

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