As term three rolls around, students in Years 9, 10 and 11 are starting to plan their subject pathways for their senior years.

Some students may be considering acceleration in one or more Year 12 subjects. This means placing them into classes with older peers to allow them to study above their year level. These students are likely to be among the most capable in their year group. They also tend to learn quickly and are highly motivated to learn.

The purpose of acceleration is to match the educational needs of these students with an appropriate level and pace of learning.

So how can students ensure it’s the right decision for them?

How subject acceleration works

In Australia, the decision to allow a student to accelerate (including in Year 12 subjects) is typically left to individual schools. However, it’s still expected schools will carefully consult with the student in question, teachers and parents as well as education specialists and psychologists. Schools should also consider the student’s abilities, grades and social and emotional maturity.

The NSW Education Standards Authority actually specifies the subjects for which Stage 6 (Year 11 and 12) acceleration is permitted. Some of these include advanced maths and English, the sciences, and subjects in the social sciences. Outside NSW, the subjects students can accelerate appear to differ from school to school.

While recent public data is not readily available, on average, more than 800 students at fully selective high schools in NSW accelerated subjects each year from 2018 to 2020.

Benefits of accelerating

Students are likely well aware of the practical benefits Year 12 subject acceleration can offer.

Completing one or more Year 12 subjects in Year 11 can spread a student’s final year study load across two years. It can also give them an earlier understanding of Year 12 study demands and how assessments are run. In Victoria, accelerating an additional Year 12 subject can add an ATAR increment too.

Subject acceleration can increase student motivation and engagement as their interests and abilities are better matched. Research suggests acceleration may also lead to better career outcomes and wellbeing. For example, a 2021 longitudinal study tracked students who accelerated in the United States and found their psychological wellbeing was above average at age 50.

Outside of learning, acceleration can provide more opportunities to create friendships with students in the year level above who have similar abilities and interests. Teachers, too, may benefit from having a smaller range of abilities to accommodate in the classroom.

What to watch out for

While there are many positives to subject acceleration, not every student may be suited to it. For example, some students may face social difficulties in classes they accelerate into when developing relationships with students above their year level.

And if teachers lack familiarity with (or training on) the practice, subject acceleration may not always be successful. Also, if teachers and parents haven’t properly assessed whether students are socially and academically ready, then acceleration may not be the right choice.

Research suggests common concerns around accelerated students experiencing increased pressure, burnout or reduced confidence appear to be unfounded in both the short and long terms.

How does a student know it’s right for them?

These are some factors students and families can consider to help them make a decision. Subject acceleration is most likely to be successful if:

1. the student is strongly motivated to accelerate in the subject without any pressure from parents, peers or their school

2. the student has proved they can take on the accelerated subject based on previous assessments of ability and achievement

3. the student has the social and emotional maturity to take on the challenge of acceleration in a new learning environment

4. the school is able to provide individualised support to students such as testing for gaps in learning and then addressing these gaps with additional teacher or mentor support

If the student is still unsure, they may be able to trial a period of acceleration before making a final decision.

Jae Yup Jung, Associate Professor, School of Education, UNSW

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

I’ve been fortunate to dive in Tasmania’s giant kelp forests over the past three decades, launching into chilly waters. When diving in these forests, light filters through the golden ribbon-like fronds in beams, lighting the array of fish that sail through like birds in a rainforest. On the seabed, pearlescent abalone shells shine and sunset-orange crayfish prowl, eyes agog.

Kelp forms a foundational part of the Great Southern Reef, which extends 8,000 kilometres around southern Australia from Kalbarri in Western Australia to Coolangatta in Queensland. Here, for certain groups of organisms – seaweeds, sponges, crustaceans, chordates, bryozoans, echinoderms and molluscs – as many as 30–80% of species are found nowhere else on Earth. Think the weedy sea dragon, for instance, with its leaf-like fins.

The region is a biodiversity hotspot, lesser known than the Great Barrier Reef, but equally worthy. There are also commercially important species such as rock lobsters and abalone that rely on healthy reefs for shelter and food.

Giant kelp is found in the southeastern corner of the Great Southern Reef. It has historically been a tourism drawcard. Diving in giant kelp forests is like being transported into the Jack and the Beanstalk fable – which is not really an exaggeration, given its almost miraculous growth rate. Giant kelp can grow 50 centimetres a day in ideal conditions, reaching more than 30 metres from the seafloor.

It used to choke boat propellers, hampering anchoring around Tasmania, but in recent decades giant kelp has declined by 95% along the island’s east coast. The reason for its demise: warmer, nutrient-poor waters extending further down the Australian coastline than they once did, as well as the arrival of the invasive long-spined sea urchin, which grazes on kelp and other seaweeds, causing marine deserts called barrens.

In 2012, the giant kelp marine forests of southeast Australia became the first marine community to be listed as endangered under the federal government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

My husband, Craig Johnson, a marine biologist, was one of the first to document the decline and to think of rearing warm-tolerant giant kelp varieties and reseeding them in the wild, through his work at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Science.

Now, teams of researchers are working on just this, buoyed by the possibility of restoring Tasmania’s iconic undersea forests. Trials have shown that giant kelp forest can return in the space of a year.

So nature can heal if given a chance. The dream is that warm-tolerant strains could be successfully reared and replanted at scale, and that these forests would reseed more forests. If invasive urchins could be controlled, the barrens could again be replaced by healthy temperate reefs.

In an era of eco-grief, rewilding projects like this are having a moment, even attracting the interest of royalty. On their March 2026 visit to Tasmania, Denmark’s Queen Mary and King Frederik accompanied researchers on a field trip to a remnant stand of giant kelp south of Hobart in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. They heard from the institute’s Scott Ling about the reseeding efforts.

It begs the question: can we imagine ourselves into a brighter future? From moves to restore giant kelp forests in Tasmania to the successful reintroduction of white storks in the United Kingdom, where they are now breeding for the first time in 600 years, the answer might be yes.

Rewilding takes hold

In a growing number of places around the world, a vision to bring species back from the brink of extinction is working. Some projects, such as the kelp one, involve selecting and rearing naturally occurring resilient varieties that can thrive in our changed circumstances. Others involve simply reintroducing lost species that were once predominant, such as wolves in forests in northern Europe.

Endangered eastern quolls are being reintroduced to a highland property known as the Quoin in the Tasmanian highlands, with confirmation of the successful arrival of pouch young, a sign that the program, which introduced 24 quolls in 2025, is progressing well. This program emerges from the broader vision of Lisa Miller, a zoologist by training, through Wedgetail, a private company investing in restoring ecologically valuable areas around the globe.

I’ve seen a quoll only once, on our property south of Hobart, a sleek spotted flash through the bush, so fast I questioned whether it was real. How wonderful if they were to return in numbers, if not yet to the suburbs of Hobart, then to the Tasmanian highlands.

Storks bringing luck

A world away in Sussex, England, success at an old castle estate is capturing the world’s eye, and its heart. Thanks to the vision of property owners Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, a highly successful rewilding effort is transforming Knepp Estate. Myriad species are returning, from white storks to purple emperor butterflies.

Thanks to the work of the owners and the research and community organisations with which they have partnered, the list of species flocking to Knepp Castle Estate has a ring of the Middle Ages to it. Knepp has become a breeding hotspot for critically endangered nightingales and turtle doves. Then there are peregrine falcons, sparrowhawks and skylarks. Tree has documented the project in her book Wilding, and captured it too in a hit documentary of the same name.

I visited the property in 2023 and met Laura Vaughan-Hirsch, a biologist who manages the white stork project at Knepp.

She told me the white storks were initially introduced to Knepp from Poland’s Warsaw Zoo. She showed me a taxidermied specimen, one of that first cohort, its body the height of a human torso, its strong beak silent. During greetings, and at other times, the storks throw their heads back and clatter their beaks in a sound captured on video in the live web cameras stationed in the Knepp oaks – watched by viewers the world over.

Since the arrival of those first storks from Warsaw Zoo, the numbers have grown remarkably, with birds arriving from wild populations. Last year there were 19 nests, which produced 45 fledglings.

People in the local community have been mesmerised by the return of the birds, some of which have started nesting on rooftops in neighbouring suburbs. Also returning are red kites, which were common in the skies above England in Shakespeare’s times. The kites are now attempting to predate on the stork nests and are being driven away by storks – the skies alive with a contest that hasn’t been seen for centuries.

It was in 1822 that the phenomenon of long-distance bird migration began to be understood in the West. A white stork was found in Germany bearing an African spear. It remains on display at the University of Rostock in Germany. Prior to that, myths abounded that the birds hibernated.

With knowledge of migration comes awareness: birds moving between countries in different seasons could well be the same population. If the population disappears from one area, it disappears from all. Likewise, if a bird species returns in healthy numbers to a region, the benefits can be far-reaching.

On my visit to Knepp, I took a tour during an open day, where members of the community were invited to hear about the programs underway. The tour leader was Tony Whitbred, formerly the chief executive of the Sussex Wildlife Trust and now a volunteer with the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre. He was expecting only a handful of people to accompany him on a walk through the property for the guided lecture. He ended up with an audience of 300.

The secret at Knepp has been to restore the environment from the ground up, first introducing wild herbivores that play a role in tilling the soil. Healthy soil led to invertebrate species thriving. Knepp now boasts the largest population of purple emperor butterflies in the UK. Bird populations have followed the increase in invertebrates.

People can pay to stay overnight at Knepp in treetop tents, an opportunity to have something of a safari experience and to commune with nature on this unique property just 25km from Gatwick airport.

Rewilding has its detractors, with some concerned about the invasion of weed species or the loss of farmland. But in the case of Knepp, the property’s heavy clay soils made the property unproductive before the program began.

Wolves on the march and greener cities

In Europe, wolves too are on the march, with 21,500 estimated to be living on the continent in 2022, a 58% increase over a decade. The return of boar, deer and other prey species has seen the wolf population expand, along with an increasing number of wolf-human interactions in countries such as Denmark.

While not everyone is a fan, the return of top predators results in changes through the food web known as trophic cascades. The effect of predators propagating downward through food webs means that ecosystems function again as they once did.

Cities are being rewilded too, to a lesser degree, but where this is occurring, it is being shown to work with species such as platypus, beavers and hornbills returning to city parks around the world.

Rewilding projects aim to mitigate biodiversity loss by returning species that have been lost. Research has even shown that rewilding could help mitigate climate change, for instance, with restored wetlands acting as climate sinks.

Yet there are challenges to rewilding. In Australia, the immense problem of feral predators such as cats and foxes mean efforts that simply create “safe havens” (devoid of feral animals) for wildlife, while vital, aren’t enough. Feral populations in the wild also need to be controlled if rewilding is to succeed more broadly.

Likewise, trying to rear warm-water-tolerant corals to help the vast Great Barrier Reef, while admirable, is labour-intensive and not a perfect fix on its own given the issue of scale. Also, once water temperatures outstrip even these corals’ ability to cope with human-made climate change, other solutions will be needed to address the damage to the reef.

But by providing something of a soothing balm of hope, could rewilding (a central theme in my new novel) also encourage further pragmatic action, a green revolution that could spread around the planet? The idea does seem to be catching on, not only for the benefits to the natural world, but for the benefits to humans. For we too, of course, are part of nature. Indeed, concepts of wildness that overlook long histories of Indigenous presence have been criticised.

The healing power of nature

More and more, researchers are recognising the health benefits from what some call nature bathing. Oxford academic Kathy Willis outlines her research on this subject in her 2024 book Good Nature. Her interest began 15 years ago when she came across a study that showed hospital patients recovered from surgery three times faster if they could see trees through their hospital windows instead of seeing walls. Her research since has shown the scientific link between green spaces and better health, mood and longevity. She covers surprising facts, such as how the scent of cedar boosts cancer-fighting cells in our immune system, and how touching wood can calm us.

There is even an academic specialty known as “blue health”. Irish national surf champion and scientist Easkey Britton has documented the science behind our connection with the water and its psychological impact on us. Surfers and scuba divers know this intuitively in their bodies and minds.

I, too, have joined a cold-water swimming group in Hobart. I’ve observed that the act of plunging into the ocean and remaining for as many minutes as the sea is warm – 13°C equals 13 minutes of immersion – brings people together. Perhaps part of the feeling of wellbeing comes simply from community.

Psychological research tells us that, as individuals, a healthy dose of daydream plus pragmatic action can help us achieve the lives we want to live. There is some evidence that, collectively, imagining a better future can also help us feel closer to one another and move together in that direction.

Katherine Johnson’s novel Every Wild Soul is published by HarperCollins.

Katherine Johnson, Adjunct Researcher in Humanities, University of Tasmania

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

The play symbol is one of the world’s most recognisable icons. Across languages, writing systems, and cultures, a single right-pointing triangle is widely understood as “start”.

Yet there’s nothing about this simple geometric icon that inherently suggests the start of something. So why does it carry this meaning?

The emergence of such universal media symbols is relatively recent in design history.

An early case study

From the 1960s, consumer audio and video technologies became internationally widespread. In 1963, the Philips EL3300 was the first mass market recorder for the brand-new medium of compact cassettes.

It featured a single button that slid left, right and up to control playback. These directions were indicated by the double-arrow rewind and fast-forward symbols, and the single arrow play symbol, respectively.

However, in this early device, the play symbol points upward, to indicate the direction the button must be moved to activate the device’s play feature.

Direction of play: left to right

Rather than being the creation of a single company or designer, the play button as we know it now emerged from a range of firms producing specialist and consumer recording equipment throughout the 1960s, including Ampex, Philips, Norelco, Grundig and Sony. These early products included a range of icons and text labels for various functions.

The play icon was among the earliest to be used. The Sony TC-100 cassette recorder, released in 1968, is one of the first devices to fully eliminate textual labels in favour of the media icons we recognise today. Notably, the TC-100 includes a right-pointing triangle for “play”.

So why does this play icon point right? On early magnetic tape recorders, tape was transported between two reels. The reel on the left side of a device contained the fresh tape. Pressing the play button caused the reels to spin, which passed the tape from the left reel through the play head, before it accumulated on the right reel.

When compact cassettes were introduced, they followed this same pattern. Thus, the play button became associated with the direction the tape moved while “playing”.

By the late 1960s, cassette recorders had spread from Europe to the United States and Japan, and manufacturers faced the problem of how to design controls that were understandable across languages and alphabets.

Preferring simple and unambiguous signs, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) converged on the right-pointing triangle as the standard play symbol. While the records for who used this icon first are hazy, the Sony TC-100 is a likely candidate.

Back to the future

The rewind and fast-forward symbols standardised by the ISO and IEC build on this same basic directional cue. Where a single triangle suggests progression at normal speed, doubled triangles indicate increased urgency in the pointed direction.

These conventions were originally applied to the transport controls – the buttons affecting the direction of tape movement – in analogue audio and film systems. But as more devices emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, these symbols expanded across a wider ecosystem of boomboxes, VCRs, camcorders and digital media.

Stop, for a moment, and for good

The square shape of the stop symbol is graphically distinct from “play”. With four corners, instead of three, no direction is indicated.

In his book Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning, renowned typeface designer Adrian Frutiger notes the shape of a square is associated with stability and closure, which metaphorically aligns with the cessation of an activity.

Similarly, the pause can be thought of as a temporary halt. While the exact origins of the pause symbol are hard to pin down, the parallel bars are reminiscent of the “caesura” used in poetry and musical composition to represent a break in continuity.

At once universal and malleable

As media technologies shifted from mechanical systems to electronic and eventually digital ones, these symbols quickly took on new meanings. The play button in particular has transcended its button-pushing roots to become a metaphor for the start of anything, such as the wash cycle on your washing machine.

This symbolism has even been leveraged across brands and marketing campaigns. In New Zealand, the Hillary Commission promoted its Push Play campaign throughout the 1990s and 2000s to get young Kiwis more physically active. And in 2019, the Ireland-based Barretstown Children’s Charity launched its We Press Play on Childhood initiative to help seriously ill children participate in “normal” childhood experiences at a specialised camp.

We find similar uses with other media symbols.

In 2022, the sports drink Powerade launched its Pause Is Power campaign to challenge the win-at-all-costs mentality in sports. And last year, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority launched 25 Metro Rewind, a year-in-review campaign aimed at increasing Metro usage by encouraging riders to revisit their travel history.

From Tokyo, to Muscat, to Palmerston North, isn’t it handy that you’ll always know which button to press to clean your clothes, start your favourite song, or change the channel on TV?

Jason Kennedy, Senior Lecturer Above the Bar of Animated Performance, Auckland University of Technology

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

Before modern weapons of mass destruction, there was Greek fire (ignis graecus). This was the term medieval Crusaders applied to Byzantine (Eastern Roman) incendiary weapons famously used in naval combat in the Eastern Mediterranean from around 673 CE to at least the 1180s.

So secret was the recipe for Greek fire that it died with the Byzantine Empire, which fell to the Ottoman Empire in May 1453.

Since then, many alchemists, historians, chemists and experimental archaeologists have tried to work out the long-lost recipe of this Byzantine super-weapon.

So, what do we actually know about this secret super-weapon?

How to use a secret weapon

Greek fire was a combustible liquid, sprayed onto enemy fleets through a brass or bronze tube (siphōn) mounted on the bows of Byzantine ships.

The liquid stuck to the surface of whatever it was sprayed on, including water, and couldn’t be extinguished. This Byzantine-era napalm gave their fleets a major tactical advantage over enemy vessels.

In the 7th century, the naval prowess of the rising Arab power presented new challenges for the Byzantine Empire.

Arab seamanship and technology – including the lateen sail, a triangular sail on a long yard that allowed ships to sail closer to the wind and thus be more manoeuvrable – proved a considerable threat. It was in this context that Greek fire came to the fore.

Byzantine emperors were always keen to showcase access to divinely-inspired technologies that sustained their cultural and political dominance.

One source comes to us via Theophanes the Confessor, a monk and chronicler writing in the early ninth century. He reports that the weapon was invented by Kallinikos, a Jewish architect from Heliopolis in Syria, who had been driven from his home by Muslim forces.

The new weapon, which Theophanes calls “sea fire”, was used successfully to destroy the Arab ships blockading Constantinople, the Byzantine imperial capital, during the Battle of Cyzicus (around 673 CE).

The “sea fire” caused the Arab ships to catch fire; the entire crew of these ships perished.

However, Theophanes oddly writes that Byzantine warships equipped with a siphōn were already available in 671–672. In other words, Kallinikos may have merely improved the weapon.

Greek fire was also used against those desiring to usurp the Byzantine throne, like the rebel Thomas the Slav. An army officer of Slavic origin from the Pontus region (now in modern Turkey), Thomas’ naval forces were defeated by the Byzantine emperor Michael II in 821 CE.

In his imperial policy manual, Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who reigned from 913 to 959 CE, warns foreigners about seeking to learn the secret recipe of Greek fire. Chapter 13 of his manual says:

This too was revealed and taught by God through an angel to the great and holy Constantine, the first Christian emperor […] it should be manufactured among the Christians only and in the city ruled by them, and nowhere else at all, nor should it be sent nor taught to any other nation whatsoever.

When a military governor betrayed the secret, the emperor reported God punished the traitor

as he was about to enter the holy church of God, fire came down out of heaven and devoured and consumed him utterly.

Used against Vikings and Normans

In the 11th century, the Viking leader Ingvar the Far-Travelled encountered Byzantine ships armed with Greek fire weaponry. The Viking saga recording this encounter relates that the substance was heated over a furnace before a brass tube emitted the flames with a terrible roar.

What this description omits is that a pump would have been used to pressurise the combustible liquid. Modern historians assume a naked flame would have been placed before the siphōn, igniting the pent-up material when released by a valve.

One of the last documented naval uses of Greek fire, recorded by Byzantine princess Anna Komnene in her text Alexiad, was against a fleet of the Republic of Pisa (centred on the city of Pisa in Tuscany, Italy) in 1099 near the Greek island of Rhodes.

She writes that the siphōn of each ship had a gilded head of a wild animal, such as a lion, so the fire passed through its mouth – adding to the terror experienced by the empire’s enemies.

Anna Komnene also records the use of Greek fire against the Normans on land in 1108. The Normans, who were descended from Norse Vikings who had settled in northern France and the local Frankish population, had by that time expanded their reach into the Mediterranean world.

A lost recipe

To this day, we are unsure of the precise ingredients used to make Greek fire. A 2002 attempt to replicate it, led by Byzantine historian John Haldon, settled on the use of a special kind of crude oil only found in the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea – then part of Byzantine territory.

This oil is light and low in viscosity but readily combustible – perfect for use in a flame-throwing device.

This might have been mixed with pine resin or pine oil, which is sticky but also highly flammable.

The legacy of Greek fire

Despite its undeniable success, use of Greek fire declined over the centuries. Either the “secret” of the technology used to propel the flame was eventually lost, or the source of the crude oil passed beyond Byzantine control as the empire dwindled.

Regardless, Greek fire left a considerable cultural mark. The subject of myth and much speculation, it resurfaced as “wildfire” in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels, adapted into the show Game of Thrones. In this world, “wildfire” was also a heavily-guarded state secret and could burn on water.

Through this, the horror and almost mythical power of Greek fire was introduced to a new generation.

Michael B. Charles, Associate Professor, Management Discipline, Faculty of Business, Arts and Law, Southern Cross University and Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Macquarie University

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

In the opening scene of the 2001 blockbuster film The Mummy Returns, two women of Egypt’s royal court engage in spectacular hand-to-hand combat.

The scene is dramatic rather than historical, but it raises an interesting question: were Egyptian women really trained with weapons, similarly to Viking shieldmaidens?

A new study of royal skeletons, published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, suggests there may be an element of truth to this idea.

The sisters and daughters of pharaoh Amenemhat II, who died around 1900 BC, were buried with bows, maces and in at least one case a dagger. The new research, led by Zaineb Hashesh at Egypt’s University of Beni-Suef, suggests these weren’t just for decoration.

The women behind the treasures

Few Egyptian artefacts are as striking as the dagger buried with Princess Ita almost 4,000 years ago. Its handle, made of lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold, is a masterpiece of Middle Kingdom craftsmanship. Yet the real mystery is the princess who was buried with it.

Princess Ita was one of five royal women interred in richly furnished underground tombs at Dahshur, the royal necropolis south of modern Cairo, as part of the family group associated with Amenemhat II. The pharaoh was buried nearby in the White Pyramid complex, named for its dazzling Tura limestone casing.

These women were members of Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty, one of the most powerful periods of the Middle Kingdom.

Excavated by Jacques de Morgan in the 1890s, the matching burial chambers contained extraordinary jewellery and cosmetic objects. They also held weapons – bows, arrows, maces and Princess Ita’s exquisite dagger.

This has intrigued Egyptologists for more than a century, as weaponry has traditionally been associated with elite men rather than female burials.

Reading lives written in bones

The study of a person’s life through their skeleton is called osteobiography. The combination of burial context, artefacts, historical records and skeletal evidence means osteobiography can be a compelling way to reconstruct ancient lives.

Archaeologists often favour large studies comparing hundreds of skeletons to understand health, diet and lifestyle across a population. Yet individuals from the deep past who have an identity – a name, family relationships, a burial context – are rarer, but scientifically powerful in their own way.

One of the most famous examples is the Viking cemetery at Birka, Sweden. Here, a 10th-century grave containing weapons and a board game was long assumed to belong to a male warrior – until DNA confirmed the skeleton was that of a woman.

Were the Dahshur princesses really archers?

The Twelfth Dynasty burials reveal an equally surprising story. Despite careful mummification, most soft tissue has turned to dust over the millennia, and the skulls were lost in the early 1900s.

However, many long bones and muscle attachments survived well enough for modern osteological analysis of the princesses’ physical activity.

The six skeletal remains – King Hor and five princesses, Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret, Nubhetepti-Khered and one unnamed woman – show muscle attachment areas associated with repetitive motions of precision gripping and pulling, consistent with archery.

Bones are remodelled continually in response to biomechanical strain. The repetitive high-intensity gripping needed to stabilise and draw a bow has been shown to leave lasting marks on bone structure. These markers can’t prove a single activity, but they are good indicators of long-term movement patterns.

Princess Noub-Hotep offers the clearest example, with bowing of her second metacarpal (a hand bone) and arrows among her burial goods.

Combined with the weapons found in the tombs, the study’s authors argue these skeletal signatures point to regular, habitual use of weapons. In other words, they say, these were not merely ceremonial burial goods.

A royal life may not have been an easy one

Fracture patterns in the bones add another dimension. Princess Itaweret shows healed trauma in a rib and foot-bone consistent with a fall or a forceful blow. King Hor has a hand fracture and skull trauma, both healed. This suggests a more physically demanding life than the sedentary existence often imagined for ancient elites.

Elite status didn’t buffer them from other hardships either: the eye sockets of King Hor show potential signs of nutritional stress and infectious disease. The shinbones of Princess Nubhetepti-Khered have features often linked to repetitive activity such as food preparation – but perhaps in this instance tied to ritual or court function.

Where next for the Dahshur royals?

The princesses may have been buried decades after their father, as part of a ritual system securing the king’s eternal rebirth. This study is unlikely to be the final word on their lives.

If DNA can ever be recovered from the skeletons, it could clarify family relationships, including for the unnamed woman in her 20s.

Further microscopic analysis (histology) of the bones could reveal how activity changed over a lifetime – whether the strain of drawing a bow declined with age, particularly in the older princesses, Khenmet and Noub-Hotep.

Comparing these elite burials with working-class remains from the same period could also show whether ordinary Egyptians bore similar patterns of biomechanical stress and disease.

Together, these approaches have the potential to transform these remarkable burials from archaeological discoveries into rich, detailed biographies of the people themselves.

Royal women whose stories have often been eclipsed by the reigns of male kings can take their place as actors in Egypt’s history, rather than passive figures in the archaeological record.

Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Heritage, Adelaide University and Michael Westaway, Professor of Archaeology and Biological Anthropology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

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

Anyone old enough to remember Kevin Keegan in his heyday as a player will also have etched on the memory his 1980 television advert for the aftershave and deodorant brand Brut.

Featuring Keegan working out in the gym and bantering in the locker room alongside boxing legend Henry Cooper, it was an early example of a footballer doing what would now be called “leveraging his personal brand”.

Keegan, whose death at the age of 75 was announced on Monday, was Britain’s first footballing superstar. But he was also perhaps the first to intuitively grasp the idea that his success as a footballer could be turned into something that held a wider cultural and commercial value – and could make him a celebrity in the world beyond sport.

Today’s footballing superstars are autonomous economic and cultural forces, global celebrities far beyond their sport, and Keegan was a bridge from that old world to the new.

Beyond football

Before the Brut ad, TV-watching Britain had been introduced to Keegan in a short public information film. Sharp and stylish in a wide-lapelled jacket with a broad black and white check, black polo-neck and chain, he tells a young boy how to cross the road safely. He seems confident and poised; a natural TV performer.

The Brut ad came next, and then promotion for Lyons Maid ice lollies. In 1996, by now manager of Newcastle United, Keegan starred with the Honey Monster in a Sugar Puffs advert that showcased the self-deprecating humour that had became an integral part of his public personality.

Today, top players cultivate, trademark and market their names, personalities, goal celebrations and much else. Consider the star names who turned out for the Nike and Adidas World Cup ads, Lamine Yamal and Ronaldinho promoting McDonalds, or the ubiquity of David Beckham in half-time commercial breaks.

But in the 1970s and 1980s this was very new. There were famous footballers, of course – some, like George Best, had pop-star appeal – but football was a working-class industry and players functioned as labour in the service of their clubs.

Less than 20 years previously, footballers had gone on strike to overturn the iniquitous maximum wage, which meant that even the biggest stars could earn no more than £20 a week – £25,000 a year in today’s money. It would be another 20 years before the Bosman ruling gave players the freedom of movement that created the circumstances for today’s astronomical salaries.

Down-to-earth, sharp and articulate, Keegan was ahead of the game. In 1976, at the height of his Liverpool career, he appeared on the BBC’s Superstars, a show that attracted massive prime-time audiences by pitting athletes from different sports against each other in a decathlon-style competition.

He competed tigerishly, but fell off his bike during the cycle heat, suffering cuts and abrasions on his back and arms. Expected to pull out, he opted to continue, saying: “These people here in the stands have come here to see me make a fool of myself and they’ve got a right to it!” That moment – in today’s social-media world it would have gone viral – and his self-deprecating reaction to it, helped to establish Keegan as a personality beyond football.

Personal brand

The self-confidence and curiosity that drove Keegan to become the first Englishman to appear in the German Bundesliga, also allowed him to appear in a pioneering 1979 documentary Brian Moore meets Kevin Keegan.

We’ve grown used to behind-the-scenes, fly-on-the wall TV shows today. But back then, there was something extraordinary about hearing Keegan talk frankly about his problems. He discussed settling in Germany, the way he was ostracised by his Hamburg teammates and the anger issues that culminated in an eight-week suspension for punching an opponent.

His ability to be authentic and vulnerable were in startling contrast to the macho inarticulacy that dominated both football and wider society. Today, it is well understood that authenticity (or at least the performance of it) increases spectators’ identification with football stars. But this was uncharted territory in the 1970s.

Characteristically, Keegan overcame his rocky start in Germany and won over the Hamburg fans. They christened him “Mighty Mouse” after a then famous cartoon character. Along with “King Kev” – bestowed on him by Liverpool supporters – these were more than just nicknames, but further components in a developing personal brand that prefigured “CR7” (Cristiano Ronaldo) “O Fenômeno” (Ronaldo) and “Cold Palmer” (Cole Palmer).

Keegan’s personal style added to his fame and cultural influence. In the mid-1970s he pioneered the bubble perm – a bouncy, tightly curled hair-do. It stood out in a football world defined by rugged, utilitarian cuts like the mullet. After initial bemusement and mockery, Keegan’s style was widely copied by other players and became one of the defining male hairstyles of the era. He also developed his own clothing line, influenced by the idiosyncratic and highly stylised Avengers TV series.

Keegan was a great player who became a brand. In an era before the internet and social media, he didn’t achieve the global influence and untold wealth of Ronaldo or Beckham. But back then there was no road map to the kind of celebrity that Keegan achieved – and he paved the way for footballers who came after him.

Simon Hinde, Programme Director, Journalism and Publishing, University of the Arts London

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

Film photography is experiencing a resurrection, summoned by unlikely conjurers: Gen Z.

It wasn’t too long ago that analog photography – which uses photographic film and chemical processing – was declared all but dead, relegated to the province of niche hobbyists and professional artists.

Digital cameras had taken over nearly all areas of photographic production. Film industry titans like Polaroid and Kodak had shrunk dramatically from their heyday, becoming shells of their former selves. Darkrooms, where students learned how to manually develop and print film, shuttered at high schools and college campuses across the country, replaced by digital labs. For most people, the spirit of analog photography was mainly channeled through Instagram filters.

But within the past five years, younger people have been increasingly drawn to the old way of doing photography.

In 2025, 35% of the 42 million active film camera users worldwide were reported to be between the ages of 18 and 30. The year prior, online searches for analog photography saw a 41% rise.

Disposable camera sales have been steadily increasing since 2023. The photography journal PetaPixel went a step further and announced 2024 as “film’s best year in decades,” as major brands have introduced new cameras in response to renewed demand and revived classic models. More than 30% of respondents to a 2024 Ilford Photo survey on film photography were in the 25-34 age group.

As I’ve witnessed more and more of my undergraduate art and design students embrace analog photography, I’m not seeing this as a trend rooted in a nostalgic yearning for the past. Instead, I’m seeing it as young people rejecting algorithms, breaking free from the alienation of social media and reacting to childhoods spent on Zoom and TikTok – a deliberate move to redefine the future of art, social connection and engagement with the world.

Pining for a ‘third place’

In my work as a historian of photography and lecturer at the University of Southern California, I’ll often ask my students about how they take photos – whether they’re using digital cameras their smartphones or analog devices.

This year, for the first time, some of my students discussed images they’d printed and the physical photography albums they’d put together of their friends and family. They talked about how they’d also been sending postcards, writing letters and tacking photographs to their bedroom walls.

I couldn’t help but think about how so much of the language tied to early social media seemed to refashion physical gestures for a virtual world – “posting” on a “wall,” “poking,” “tagging” and “bookmarking,” not to mention “friending.”

This was a rhetorical move by social media companies, likely designed to help people feel as though they were in a familiar terrain of social connection. Yet the underlying business model of these platforms depended more on maximizing engagement and advertising revenue than on nurturing authentic relationships.

Everyone knows what happened next: The more connected young people became online, the more isolated and detached they started to feel. The COVID-19 lockdown pushed social life online even further, and researchers are only now starting to see how the combination of increased screen time and isolation negatively affected adolescents’ mental health. By 2023, 51% of American teenagers reported they spend at least four hours a day on social media.

I see the attraction of analog photography as a response to life lived through screens, a pathway toward community engagement and the desire for what sociologists call “a third place.”

Coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place,” third places are meant as a space separate from home and work. They offer a reprieve for the in-between, generating the conditions needed for creative cross-pollination. They might include a local cafe, a neighborhood writing group, a weekly Magic: The Gathering game or a college fraternity – any space that allows for social interaction and personal growth.

These spaces also combat loneliness. They get people out of their heads and into a community. Oldenburg also referred to them as “havens of sociability,” places or gatherings where people can arrive alone to join others, and the atmosphere is “democratic and festive.”

Analog communities IRL

In April 2026, the inaugural AnalogCon took place in Los Angeles. Organized by the Los Angeles Center of Photography, where I serve as executive director and chief curator, it was a festival for all things analog photography. It didn’t just serve as a third place for photography enthusiasts; it also showed how analog photography – as a practice, ritual and community – is flourishing.

Vendors, industry leaders, artists and teachers participated in the two-day event, which included exhibitions, panels, demonstrations and guided photography tours around Little Tokyo. The excitement and thirst for similar events was palpable.

Photography now joins a broader trend of a generational preoccupation with physical cultural objects and media. Although music streaming represents 82% of revenues generated in the music industry, vinyl records sales have been rising for over a decade, crossing the US$1 billion threshold in the U.S. in 2025.

Nearly 60% of Gen Z are now purchasing records. VHS tapes and VCR players are also making a strange comeback, with stores like Be Kind Video and Videotheque in California offering VHS, DVDs and Blu-ray rentals.

But beyond that, record stores and video rental shops have become third places in their own right. There’s a big difference between selecting a film to stream from your bed and getting out of the house, going to a store and talking about movies with a clerk and fellow film enthusiasts.

Think about the sound a tape cassette makes when you open and close it, or the vibrant graphics on the covers of DVDs or VHS tapes. Think about rewinding or making a mixtape for your recent crush. These are objects of belonging that signal specific cultural moments, rituals and aesthetics, and many young people today are starting to experience them for the first time.

Now, think about gently inserting a roll of film into a camera. Think about choosing an angle carefully when snapping a photo, because the number of frames is limited and you want to make them count. Think about the thrill of discovery when the pictures finally emerge as objects on paper.

To me, these are more than fleeting trends. They signal a push against a digital culture that is designed to cultivate envy and reward outrage, insults and humiliation.

Instead, armed with rolls of film, more and more Gen Zers appear to be opting out of their algorithmic feeds in favor of experiencing life in ways that feel more deliberate, personal and tangible.

Rotem Rozental, Lecturer in Critical Studies, Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California

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

For many centuries, the writings of Plutarch of Chaeronia (c.46-119CE) were at the heart of elite humanistic education in the West. We can see the influence of his Lives of Eminent Greeks and Romans and the philosophical essays in his work Moralia in early modern authors from Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon to William Shakespeare.

Many of Plutarch’s essays also have a practical focus that can seem very timely in our social media age. He writes about how to cool the desire to gossip and pry into other people’s lives and how not to be taken in by salacious stories.

He gives advice about how to avoid being triggered by others’ provocations and how to benefit from disagreement. He advises on how to speak about ourselves without boasting or self-advertisement, how to tell friends from conmen (or flatterers) trying to sell us something, and how to pay attention so our minds are not overloaded and scattered.

It almost seems as if Plutarch was peering into the 21st century and responding to the mental health challenges our commercialised social media is producing at scale.

The reality, as journalist Max Fisher outlines in his book The Chaos Machine, is that social media companies have identified the same psychological vulnerabilities Plutarch hoped to help readers to correct, recognising them as effective ways to “maximise user engagement”.

Change begins with seeing the problems

Plutarch belongs to the ancient Greco-Roman culture in which philosophy was not conceived solely as a theoretical pursuit, but was linked to the pursuit of happiness. In this tradition, which long predates the advent of modern psychology, philosophers could take on the role of therapists, proffering advice on life’s challenges.

Plutarch’s practical ethics in the Moralia propose two ways to help people to live happier, more serene lives.

The first is to highlight the bad consequences of cultivating bad habits as a way of invoking shame and a desire to change. People who are constantly comparing their lives with others, for instance, are likely to suffer from envy and dissatisfaction with themselves:

there are some who cannot bear to face their own lives, regarding these as a most unlovely spectacle […] but their souls, being full of all manner of vices, shuddering and frightened at what is within, leap outwards and prowl about other people’s concerns and there latch onto and fatten their own malice.

Even without algorithmic assistance, the gossip who pries into others’ supposed secrets is likely to be taken in by the most sensational, exaggerated speculations about what others are doing behind closed doors:

For as wheat shut up in a jar is found to have increased in quantity, but to have deteriorated in quality, so when a story finds its way to a gossip, it generates a large addition of falsehood and thereby destroys its credit.

The habit of dwelling on causes of resentment, as algorithmic social media can promote today, produces “an evil disposition of soul, which people call irascibility”. A daily diet of outrage make a person “become sore and vexed at trifles and querulous at everyday occurrences, like iron thin and beaten out too finely”.

Philosophy as therapy

Plutarch’s second suggestion is prescribing regimens of what we would call cognitive-behavioural exercises. These regimens start small and aim to build up new, beneficent habits in place of the old.

Busybodies who want to know about things that don’t concern them, for instance, should first practice things like not reading every piece of graffiti on public walls they pass (the Roman world had plenty of such graffiti, as our inner cities do).

It may seem that no harm will come from reading these, but it does harm you by imperceptibly instilling the practice of searching out matters which do not concern you.

Then they should practice not looking in at every door they pass on the street. They should then practice not opening every letter they receive straight away. Gradually, through such small steps, they will build a new habit, in doing so winning attention back to their own affairs.

Today, we can adapt Plutarch’s advice by turning off the alerts on our phones and computers. We can pause before we respond straight away. We can then set times to do emails or check on our apps. And we can practice reading carefully and breathing deeply before hitting “reply”, let alone “reply all”.

It won’t happen overnight. But concerted repetition can gradually allow a person to regain control over how they engage and when, with online content and “socials”, rather than the tail wagging the dog.

Unhappiness 2.0

Like the ancient Stoics and Epicureans, Plutarch argued the happiest life is one of inner serenity and cheerfulness towards others. The happy person prioritises what they really value and savours what they have, rather than being pulled in a hundred different directions and wracked by FOMO (fear of missing out).

The chief cause of unhappiness is excessive self-love. This, writes Plutarch, “makes men eager to be first and to be victorious in everything and insatiably desirous of engaging in everything”. It makes people want to be “rich, learned, strong, […] and friends of kings and magistrates of cities.”

Today, it drives people to compete to win thousands of “followers” they’ll never meet and compare themselves endlessly with others’ artfully curated online profiles.

Advertisements are dissatisfaction machines, from a Plutarchean perspective: they fill us with desires for things we do not always need and which cannot lastingly satisfy us. He observes that “we do not manage our impulses, as sailors do their sails, to correspond to our capacity; in our expectations we aim at things too great”.

Happy people focus on what they can control. They compare themselves only with people who are worse off, to remind themselves to be grateful for what they have.

Social media prompts us constantly to compare ourselves with others who present unrealistic, glamorous images of their lives. Quantified metrics of likes, shares, followers, views and citations are there to fill people with envy.

These metrics prompt users to engage more, making themselves ever more dependent on others’ approval: “despite all this, we habitually live, out of stupidity, with our attention on others rather than ourselves.”

Plutarch’s counsel for us today would not be to turn our devices off. This is not socially possible for most people, given the changed nature of work and leisure.

Yet recent legal findings in the US, as well as growing research on the effects of social media use, especially on young people, underscore that algorithm-driven social media does not promote, and can negatively effect, individual wellbeing.

It is also has a divisive effect on liberal democracies, stoking mutual suspicion and hatreds.

Plutarch’s philosophical therapies for the sources of our unease which have been stoked by our interconnected, commercialised world all turn upon knowing ourselves. Notably, they recognise the ways our natural egotism can be played to by flatterers – or, today, by algorithms that “feed” our “likes” and our outrage.

Becoming conscious of the ways platforms (algorithmic flatterers), are designed to foster social media addiction and play to our desires and fears, allows us to become more deliberate about how we use our devices and better manage the information that increasingly floods us all.

Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University

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