In 1570, a Frenchman was arrested for smuggling clandestine correspondence between France and England. A passing comment in his interrogation document reveals that he also happened to be carrying a leather bag “in which there were three or four dozen balls of wool for playing tennis”.

The French term used was jeu de paume. This sport was played with the hand (palm), often gloved, rather than a racquet. This developed into the game that in English we usually refer to as “real tennis” (a different beast to the lawn tennis played at Wimbledon).

The interrogator believed that this cheap merchandise was simply a ruse for the man’s true purpose of communicating with Huguenot exiles. I have written a book, Huguenot Networks, based on this interrogation document, which will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. But, as a historian, I was intrigued by both the number and makeup of the goods he was transporting. The wool, if wrapped tightly, could certainly have made these balls bouncy.

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By chance, I encountered similar objects in a small display in the Palazzo Te in Mantua in Italy. These balls had apparently been retrieved from the palace roof and several others had come from a nearby church. They were variously made of leather, cloth and string rather than wool, probably stuffed with earth or animal hair. Just like the handmade “real tennis” balls of today, they were harder and more variable in size than regular tennis balls, and usually not so colourful, although sometimes having a simple painted design on the outside.

Today, “real tennis” is known as the “sport of kings”, praised for testing agility and athletic prowess. The most famous court in England is at Hampton Court, but many others survive in the UK. For instance, there is one down the road from where I work at the University of Warwick, at Moreton Morrell in Warwickshire.

In the 16th century, real tennis attracted gamblers, meaning it became a later target for Puritans. Anne Boleyn is said to have placed a wager on a match she was watching on the day of her arrest. And Henry VIII, fittingly, supposedly played a match on the day Boleyn was executed.

And if there is any doubt about how dangerous tennis could be, several royal deaths in France are attributed to it. King Louis X of France was a keen player of jeu de paume. He was the first ruler to order enclosed indoor courts to be constructed. This later became popular across Europe.

In June 1316, after a particularly exhausting game, Louis X is said to have drunk a large quantity of chilled wine and soon afterwards died – probably of pleurisy, although there was some suspicion of poisoning.

Likewise, in August 1536, the death of the 18-year-old dauphin, eldest son of Francis I, was blamed on his Italian secretary, the Count of Montecuccoli, who had brought him a glass of cold water after a match. The count was subsequently executed despite a post-mortem suggesting that the prince had died of natural causes.

By the 16th century, there were two courts at the Louvre and many more around the city of Paris as well as at other royal residences. Ambassadors’ accounts describe frequent games between high-ranking courtiers and the king which could sometimes result in injury, especially if struck by one of the hard balls.

Our man carrying many tennis balls in 1570 had probably spotted a lucrative opportunity in response to rising demand. The French game had become increasingly popular in England under the Tudors.

By the Tudor period, no self-respecting European court was without its own purpose-built tennis courts where monarchs and their entourages tested their prowess and skill. They often did so before ambassadors, who could report back to their own rulers, making it a truly competitive international sport.

Thankfully, today’s game has far fewer dangers – there’s no risk of being hit by a ball full of earth or the fear of mortal retribution after beating an exhausted high-ranking opponent.

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Penny Roberts, Professor of Early Modern European History, University of Warwick

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Wimbledon is all about strawberries and cream (and of course tennis). The club itself describes strawberries and cream as “a true icon of The Championships”.

While a meal at one of the club’s restaurants can set you back £130 or more, a bowl of the iconic dish is a modest £2.70 (up from £2.50 in 2024 – the first price rise in 15 years). In 2024 visitors munched their way through nearly 2 million berries.

Strawberries and cream has a long association with Wimbledon. Even before lawn tennis was added to its activities, the All England Croquet Club (now the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club) was serving strawberries and cream to visitors. They would have expected no less. Across Victorian Britain, strawberries and cream was a staple of garden parties of all sorts. Private affairs, political fundraisers and county cricket matches all typically served the dish.

Alongside string bands and games of lawn tennis, strawberries and cream were among the pleasures that Victorians expected to encounter at a fête or garden party. As a result, one statistician wrote in the Dundee Evening Telegraph in 1889, Londoners alone consumed 12 million berries a day over the summer. At that rate, he explained, if strawberries were available year-round, Britons would spend 24 times more on strawberries than on missionary work, and twice as much as on education.

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But of course strawberries and cream were not available year-round. They were a delightful treat of the summer and the delicate berries did not last. Victorian newspapers, such as the Illustrated London News, complained that even the fruits on sale in London were a sad, squashed travesty of those eaten in the countryside, to say nothing of London’s cream, which might have been watered down.

Wimbledon’s lawn tennis championships were held in late June or early July – in the midst, in other words, of strawberry season.

Eating strawberries and cream had long been a distinctly seasonal pleasure. Seventeenth-century menu plans for elegant banquets offered strawberries, either with cream or steeped (rather deliciously, and I recommend you try this) in rose water, white wine, and sugar – as a suitable dish for the month of June.

They were, in the view of the 17th-century gardener John Parkinson, “a cooling and pleasant dish in the hot summer season”. They were, in short, a summer food. That was still the case in the 1870s, when the Wimbledon tennis championship was established.

This changed dramatically with the invention of mechanical refrigeration. From the late 19th century, new technologies enabled the global movement of chilled and frozen foods across vast oceans and spaces.

Domestic ice-boxes and refrigerators followed. These modern devices were hailed as freeing us from the tyranny of seasons. As the Ladies Home Journal magazine proclaimed triumphantly in 1929: “Refrigeration wipes out seasons and distances … We grow perishable products in the regions best suited to them instead of being forced to stick close to the large markets.” Eating seasonally, or locally, was a tiresome constraint and it was liberating to be able to enjoy foods at whatever time of year we desired.

As a result, points out historian Susan Friedberg, our concept of “freshness” was transformed. Consumers “stopped expecting fresh food to be just-picked or just-caught or just-killed. Instead, they expected to find and keep it in the refrigerator.”

Today, when we can buy strawberries year round, we have largely lost the excitement that used to accompany advent of the strawberry season. Colour supplements and supermarket magazines do their best to drum up some enthusiasm for British strawberries, but we are far from the days when poets could rhapsodise about dairy maids “dreaming of their strawberries and cream” in the month of May.

Strawberries and cream, once a “rare service” enjoyed in the short months from late April to early July, are now a season-less staple, available virtually year round from the global networks of commercial growers who supply Britain’s food. The special buzz about Wimbledon’s iconic dish of strawberries and cream is a glimpse into an earlier time, and reminds us that it was not always so.

Rebecca Earle, Professor of History, University of Warwick

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

In Raeden Richardson’s debut novel, The Degenerates, displacement and travel feature within the lives of aspiring outcasts in the wildly disparate cities of Bombay (Mumbai’s colonial precursor), in Melbourne’s inner-city lanes and southwest suburbs, and in downtown New York.

This is not strictly a novel about identity, nor assimilation. Not all its characters are Indians of the diaspora, but they all seek refuge from forms of oppression, be it caste-based, social or family violence.

Review: The Degenerates – Raeden Richardson (Text Publishing)

The Degenerates opens in 1976, with vivid snapshots of “illegal migrant workers” who leave their villages for Bombay’s Arabian sea slums, with dreams of saving enough money to buy a flat or start a family. The city is being gentrified, drugs get pedalled, arrests inevitably happen – but the lowly are not without humour, optimism and streetwise grace.

They attend “night school”, write in “cursive paragraphs”, learn “Keats and Byron” and “proper British English” from the nuns. Enterprising beggars are a familiar sight in Mumbai, and Richardson shows them to be a community tied to the legacies of colonialism.

‘Dear degenerates’

Richardson focuses on a shoe polisher from Western Maharashtra, Somnath Sunder Sonpate, who runs out of luck in Colaba’s Grant Road district, coming up against enforcers of Indira Gandhi’s mass sterilisation program: part of The Emergency from 1975 to 1977. This was a time of authoritarian rule, corruption, arrests, censorship and forced population control directed at the poor.

Somnath fails to narrowly escape the police and cannot produce a license, so he is sterilised. Meanwhile, Preeti, a woman he shares a tiffin (or meals) with, whose bed is made from the pages of old novels, gives birth in the street, without conception. This stroke of magic realism fuses the Christian belief in immaculate conception with the stigma of an oppressive Hindu caste system. Sadly, for Preeti, it is a double violence. At the hands of the beggar master, her tongue is cut out and she dies by incineration.

Somnath rescues her baby, and names her Maha. In a desperate struggle for survival, Somnath and baby Maha flee the city as stowaways, to arrive in the port of Melbourne.

The plight and flight of this street family rely on unlikely and extraordinary circumstances, establishing a mixed tone of surreal and tragicomic farce. They become squatters in Swan Street, Richmond, in Melbourne’s inner northeast. Then, in Degraves Street, Somnath labours as a shifty motorcycle mechanic in the chop shop and Maha eats herself into florid diabetes, becoming a consummate reader of history, scriptures and poetry.

When Somnath dies abruptly, Maha, also known as Mother Pulse, embraces her oddly divine manifestations. She receives letters on paper bags and napkins from outcasts, whom she addresses as “Dear degenerates”, imploring them to tell her their stories. She has them typed and printed into flyers, which are distributed under the windscreen wipers of cars. And so, the prayers and afflictions of the outcast – those who live precariously at the edges of society – are reclaimed and interwoven.

Critiquing privilege

There’s a hiatus in Maha’s story, as the narrative focus shifts to two selective school misfits, Titch and Skeater, or “ ” – a caesura – taking the place of his name. This grammatical marker becomes enigmatic of repression, private loss and what lies beyond the social fabric. The boys have a codependent, yet deeply poignant friendship at Melbourne High, until Skeater plunges into alcohol dependency.

Subsequent narrative sections cycle around Titch’s working friendship with Ginny, a Greek Australian bookseller and aspiring cryptocurrency trader. Both have troubled families: substance abuse, violence and mental health crises leave a path of brokenness. A survivor of abuse, Ginny escapes from her dysfunctional family in the suburbs with her sister, Marg, for a holiday in New York until her visa runs out. But Ginny’s caprices deviate from tourism brochures.

She befriends stylish, free-spirited Klein, an orphan fostered by an orphan, who self-medicates in burlesque nightclubs with “liquid green manza”. Ginny briefly stays with his queer family; with Gordon, an intern at the The Paris Review; and Shelley, a tall, bald, non-binary Mauritian saxophonist. Their caring and valiant efforts to secure Ginny’s blockchain trade and a working visa in New York are doomed to failure.

There’s more dialogue in this section of The Degenerates, albeit presented through a descriptive mode that frames the narrative action.

The novel’s structure fuses realist and fabulist elements. By turns capacious and wry, it also reads as Maha’s coming of age as she transforms from Dalit orphan to suburban diva. When Titch discloses his crimes of theft, she believes he is a reincarnation of her foster father, Somnath.

Her musings about rebirth and impermanence (“Here, gone”, “Many headed”) imply the plurality of a Hindu pantheon, but Maha is a standalone. Meanwhile, there’s something appealingly subversive and inherently Buddhist about the novel’s attention to small creatures like ants, a drug-intoxicated duckling, and even trilobites, extinct fossils who were “moved by the flux of life: hungering, feeding and hungering again”.

Refreshingly, Richardson’s abrupt sequences creak with a subtle critique of heteronormative culture, and of elite privilege under socialist democracy or late capitalism. There’s more than a hint of reproach aimed at those who too often speak on behalf of the Global South.

Maha’s low-caste mother, Preeti, is rendered speechless for claiming to possess special creative powers. But in its dance of minor perspectives, idiosyncrasies and conflations weaken the novel’s binding. The crystal meth Maha injects, leading to her gangrenous amputations, seems extraneous when diabetes is the cause.

In an interview, Richardson has spoken of urban spaces and laneways in Melbourne, where he was born, as being like a palimpsest. Indeed, the novel is infused with literary allusions and tropes which should be acknowledged.

Somnath’s forced sterilisation is strongly reminiscent of Ishvar’s in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, a novel also set in India’s 1975 Emergency period. Titch finds employment in Ginny’s bookshop after impressing her with the absurdity of citing the Russians: “The Tolstoy. The Dostoevsky. The Kafka.” Titch’s theft of drugs and cash faintly echo the transgressions of Raskolnikov, the impoverished student in Crime and Punishment. There is homage and a nod to foundational epistolary fictions such as Letter to Pessoa and To Silence.

Materially gritty

For all its flair and pastiche, The Degenerates retains a material grittiness. Like prose poured into blocks without line breaks, it reads like polished concrete. Each section or chunk is a cameo where the mundane become scenes of scrutiny, often with aesthetic appeal – whether it be Titch’s ants randomly in motion, the flow of water down drains, or the liquid in a case of contact lenses.

Richardson has a penchant for acronyms, such as MDMA, EDM, ATM, CBD, KFC, PVC, BMX. He seems to insist on brands and consumables, like Doritos, Mars bars, Freddo Frogs, Krispy Kremes. Telstra shops, Rebel Sport, Target, SnapChat and even the “Commbank app” make appearances.

Commodity fetishes animate the novel, however, its reliance on jargons of drug subculture and millennial crypto culture can be a strain to read, risking caricatures, at times bordering on cliché:

Bitcoin. Ethereum. Ripple, too. Even Paxos. ‘Look at the gains, yeah,’ he said.

The intense detail in Richardson’s descriptions slows down the action and depletes his characters of their psychological realities. Some of the most interesting “degenerates” – Somnath, Titch’s mother, and Skeater – make transitory appearances. This is, partly, because the author veers headlong into language’s potential for soundscapes, along with its capacity to explain and transcendentalise. Indeed, there’s an evangelical tone to the final section that deifies the writer’s task as being godlike.

When Maha’s hundreds of followers leave their families and jobs to join her in the mythic “Red Plains”, setting up “tents, tarpaulins and laundry lines”, we are told:

They watched her drive by the pages of Titch’s story. She was their creator. Their divine writer. They knew that Mother Pulse had dreamed them, her people, and set them in motion. It was true.

The passive register of omniscient narration stems Mother Pulse’s fully embodied voice, even as she furiously writes about her followers, while they seem content to be written about “with compassion and care”.

Richardson’s prose dazzles and sometimes overwhelms. However, the novel’s energy, precision, risk and charm generates scenes and outcast characters that are part of a community of marginal writing, to be read slowly against the canon, with all its literary categories, gates and privileges.

There are complex reasons why minority narratives struggle to thrive within the flow and countercurrents of a globalising, neocolonial literary economy. The Degenerates is relevant for Australia in this era of hostile immigration policy, populist nationalism and protectionism.

It poses not merely questions of travel, but provocations of travel writing, eschewing middle-class fears and insecurities. Its rare gifts are humour, perversity, syncretism and empathy for those marginalised, and their stories.

Michelle Cahill, Adjunct, Department of English, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania

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

Temperatures have dropped in many parts of Australia which means runners, cyclists, rowers, hikers, or anyone physically active outside need to take extra precautions to stay safe and exercise in relative comfort.

Cold environments can also include high winds and water exposure, which present unique physiological, psychological and logistical challenges that can turn people off exercising.

While exercising in the cold does not typically increase injury risk, certain conditions can lead to a drop in whole body temperature (hypothermia) and impaired exercise performance.

One advantage to exercising in the cold is that it often feels easier, since the body perceives lower exertion levels compared to performing the same task in hot environments.

While it’s sometimes tempting to rug up and stay indoors when temperatures plummet, here are some tips for exercising in cold conditions.

1. Wear layers

Start exercising in a slightly chilled state (if you’re warm when you begin, take a layer off).

Strip down one layer as you warm up to avoid overheating and excessive sweating, which can lead to chilling later as you cool down.

Clothing recommendations include:

• inner (base) layer: wear a lightweight, moisture-wicking fabric (such as polyester) as a base layer to keep sweat away from your skin
• middle (insulating) layer: add a fleece or thermal layer if temperatures are close to freezing
• outer layer: a windproof, water-resistant jacket is essential in wet, windy or snowy conditions
• additional considerations: for hands and feet, wear gloves and opt for polyester socks. A beanie or headband is great for the head and ears because you lose a significant amount of heat from your head.

2. Warming up is crucial

In cold conditions, your muscles may take longer to warm up and may be at a greater risk of injury due to reduced blood flow (vasoconstriction), reduced flexibility and slower reaction times.

Spend about ten minutes (perhaps indoors) performing a structured warm-up. This should include dynamic stretches and exercises such as push-ups, leg swings, lunges, calf raises, squats and high knees before heading out.

This will help enhance blood flow, increase tissue temperature and improve your joints’ range of motion.

No matter what exercise type you choose, start slowly and gradually progress your intensity.

3. Be aware of the risks

Depending on the mode of activity, outdoor exercise can be riskier during winter due to slippery surfaces and reduced visibility.

If you are walking or running, shorten your steps and stride length when it’s wet to maintain control and prevent slips and falls.

If you are cycling, avoid sharp turns or sudden stops. Stick to well-lit areas and paths and try to exercise during daylight hours if possible.

Also, consider wearing bright or reflective clothing at night or in foggy conditions.

4. The importance of recovery

Spend a few minutes at the end of your workout for active recovery (walking and stretching) which helps prevent blood pooling and inflammation in the feet, while bringing the body’s systems back to homeostasis (resting breathing and heart rate).

When it’s extremely cold, get indoors immediately because your body temperature drops fast once you stop moving.

Change out of any damp clothes and have a warm shower or bath as soon as possible to help regulate body temperature and prevent hypothermia. Be aware of signs of hypothermia, which include shivering, slurred speech, cold pale skin and poor coordination, among others.

Other tips to consider

If it’s nearing or below 0°C with wind chill or rain or snow, perhaps opt for an indoor mode of exercise such as treadmill running, stationary cycling or cross-training to avoid unnecessary risks such as hypothermia, non-freezing cold injuries (such as trenchfoot) or freezing cold injuries (frostbite).

To ensure adequate hydration, it is recommended to consume about 500ml of fluid two hours before exercise and to continue to drink during and after exercising.

If you do brave the cold to exercise outside, is still advisable to wear sunscreen (SPF 30 or higher) on exposed skin during the day, since ultra violet radiation can still pass through clouds and is not related to temperature.

Overall, exercise in the cold can be safe and enjoyable with the right precautions and planning.

Harry Banyard, Senior Lecturer in Exercise and Sports Science, Swinburne University of Technology

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

People on TikTok tend to follow accounts that align with their own political beliefs, meaning the platform is creating political echo chambers among its users. These findings, from a study my collaborators, Yanlin Li and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, and I published in the academic journal New Media & Society, show that people mostly hear from voices they already agree with.

We analyzed the structure of different political networks on TikTok and found that right-leaning communities are more isolated from other political groups and from mainstream news outlets. Looking at their internal structures, the right-leaning communities are more tightly connected than their left-leaning counterparts. In other words, conservative TikTok users tend to stick together. They rarely follow accounts with opposing views or mainstream media accounts. Liberal users, on the other hand, are more likely to follow a mix of accounts, including those they might disagree with.

Our study is based on a massive dataset of over 16 million TikTok videos from more than 160,000 public accounts between 2019 and 2023. We saw a spike of political TikTok videos during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. More importantly, people aren’t just passively watching political content; they’re actively creating political content themselves.

Some people are more outspoken about politics than others. We found that users with stronger political leanings and those who get more likes and comments on their videos are more motivated to keep posting. This shows the power of partisanship, but also the power of TikTok’s social rewards system. Engagement signals – likes, shares, comments – are like a fuel, encouraging users to create even more.

Why it matters

People are turning to TikTok not just for a good laugh. A recent Pew Research Center survey shows that almost 40% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news on TikTok. The question becomes what kind of news are they watching, and what does that mean for how they engage with politics.

The content on TikTok often comes from creators and influencers or digital-native media sources. The quality of this news content remains uncertain. Without access to balanced, fact-based information, people may struggle to make informed political decisions.

Amid the debates over banning TikTok, our study highlights how TikTok can be a double-edged sword in political communication. It’s encouraging to see people participate in politics through TikTok when that’s their medium of choice. However, if a user’s network is closed and homogeneous and their expression serves as in-group validation, it may further solidify the political echo chamber.

When people are exposed to one-sided messages, it can increase hostility toward outgroups. In the long run, relying on TikTok as a source for political information might deepen people’s political views and contribute to greater polarization.

What other research is being done

Echo chambers have been widely studied on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but similar research on TikTok is in its infancy. TikTok is drawing scrutiny, particularly its role in news production, political messaging and social movements.

TikTok has its unique format, algorithmic curation and entertainment-driven design. I believe that its function as a tool for political communication calls for closer examination.

What’s next

In 2024, the Biden/Harris and Trump campaigns joined TikTok to reach young voters. My research team is now analyzing how these political communication dynamics may have shifted during the 2024 election. Future research could use experiments to explore whether these campaign videos significantly influence voters’ perceptions and behaviors.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Zicheng Cheng, Assistant Professor of Mass Communications, University of Arizona

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

Around midday on June 13 last year, my colleagues and I were scanning the skies when we thought we had discovered a strange and exciting new object in space. Using a huge radio telescope, we spotted a blindingly fast flash of radio waves that appeared to be coming from somewhere inside our galaxy.

After a year of research and analysis, we have finally pinned down the source of the signal – and it was even closer to home than we had ever expected.

A surprise in the desert

Our instrument was located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara – also known as the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory – in remote Western Australia, where the sky above the red desert plains is vast and sublime.

We were using a new detector at the radio telescope known as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder – or ASKAP – to search for rare flickering signals from distant galaxies called fast radio bursts.

We detected a burst. Surprisingly, it showed no evidence of a time delay between high and low frequencies – a phenomenon known as “dispersion”.

This meant it must have originated within a few hundred light years of Earth. In other words, it must have come from inside our galaxy – unlike other fast radio bursts which have come from billions of light years away.

A problem emerges

Fast radio bursts are the brightest radio flashes in the Universe, emitting 30 years’ worth of the Sun’s energy in less than a millisecond – and we only have hints of how they are produced.

Some theories suggest they are produced by “magnetars” – the highly magnetised cores of massive, dead stars – or arise from cosmic collisions between these dead stellar remnants. Regardless of how they occur, fast radio bursts are also a precise instrument for mapping out the so-called “missing matter” in our Universe.

When we went back over our recordings to take a closer a look at the radio burst, we had a surprise: the signal seemed to have disappeared. Two months of trial and error went by, until the problem was found.

ASKAP is composed of 36 antennas, which can be combined to act like one gigantic zoom lens six kilometres across. Just like a zoom lens on a camera, if you try to take a picture of something too close, it comes out blurry. Only by removing some of the antennas from the analysis – artificially reducing the size of our “lens” – did we finally make an image of the burst.

We weren’t excited by this – in fact, we were disappointed. No astronomical signal could be close enough to cause this blurring.

This meant it was probably just radio-frequency “interference” – an astronomer’s term for human-made signals that corrupt our data.

It’s the kind of junk data we’d normally throw away.

Yet the burst had us intrigued. For one thing, this burst was fast. The fastest known fast radio burst lasted about 10 millionths of a second. This burst consisted of an extremely bright pulse lasting a few billionths of a second, and two dimmer after-pulses, for a total duration of 30 nanoseconds.

So where did this amazingly short, bright burst come from?

A zombie in space?

We already knew the direction it came from, and we were able to use the blurriness in the image to estimate a distance of 4,500 km. And there was only one thing in that direction, at that distance, at that time – a derelict 60-year-old satellite called Relay 2.

Relay 2 was one of the first ever telecommunications satellites. Launched by the United States in 1964, it was operated until 1965, and its onboard systems had failed by 1967.

But how could Relay 2 have produced this burst?

Some satellites, presumed dead, have been observed to reawaken. They are known as “zombie satellites”.

But this was no zombie. No system on board Relay 2 had ever been able to produce a nanosecond burst of radio waves, even when it was alive.

We think the most likely cause was an “electrostatic discharge”. As satellites are exposed to electrically charged gases in space known as plasmas, they can become charged – just like when your feet rub on carpet. And that accumulated charge can suddenly discharge, with the resulting spark causing a flash of radio waves.

Electrostatic discharges are common, and are known to cause damage to spacecraft. Yet all known electrostatic discharges last thousands of times longer than our signal, and occur most commonly when the Earth’s magnetosphere is highly active. And our magnetosphere was unusually quiet at the time of the signal.

Another possibility is a strike by a micrometeoroid – a tiny piece of space debris – similar to that experienced by the James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022.

According to our calculations, a 22 micro-gram micrometeoroid travelling at 20km per second or more and hitting Relay 2 would have been able to produce such a strong flash of radio waves. But we estimate the chance the nanosecond burst we detected was caused by such an event to be about 1%.

Plenty more sparks in the sky

Ultimately, we can’t be certain why we saw this signal from Relay 2. What we do know, however, is how to see more of them. When looking at 13.8 millisecond timescales – the equivalent of keeping the camera shutter open for longer – this signal was washed out, and barely detectable even to a powerful radio telescope such as ASKAP.

But if we had searched at 13.8 nanoseconds, any old radio antenna would have easily seen it. It shows us that monitoring satellites for electrostatic discharges with ground-based radio antennas is possible. And with the number of satellites in orbit growing rapidly, finding new ways to monitor them is more important than ever.

But did our team eventually find new astronomical signals? You bet we did. And there are no doubt plenty more to be found.

Clancy William James, Senior Lecturer (astronomy and astroparticle physics), Curtin University

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

The winter school holidays will mean families across Aotearoa New Zealand will be looking for indoor activities to entertain children. With millions of visitors each year, museums focused on the country’s history will inevitably play host to local and international visitors.

Museums tend to enjoy a high level of trust among the public. They’re widely seen as neutral, factual sources of historical knowledge.

But like all forms of storytelling, museums present the past in particular ways. They narrate events from a certain group’s or individual’s perspective and explain why events unfolded in the way they did.

In this respect, museums are not so different from historical films. Consider the different ways two recent movies – 1917 and the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front – narrate the first world war.

In 1917, the storyteller takes the British side, encouraging viewers to invest in the bravery and endurance of British soldiers. But All Quiet on the Western Front is narrated from a German perspective, inviting viewers to grieve for German soldiers as victims of a political system that glorified war.

Museum exhibitions tell stories in a similar way. Visitors should be asking not just what story is told, but why.

Spoiler alert: it often has to do with national identity. Museums tell particular stories of the past because these stories support a particular image of New Zealand as a nation.

Four questions for your next museum visit

At its core, every story has two basic ingredients: actors and events. To turn these into a compelling narrative, the storyteller connects the events into a plot, so they build on each other. The storyteller also transforms actors into characters by giving them particular traits — brave, selfish, wise, cruel and the like. Museums do this, too.

As you move through a museum exhibition, try asking yourself the following questions:

1. Which historical events are included — and which are left out?

Every story begins somewhere. Museums choose which events to include and which to leave out, shaping how visitors understand what happened and why.

Take Te Papa’s Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War exhibition. It opens with the landing at ANZAC Cove but skips over events in the lead-up to WWI — such as Britain’s earlier moves to seize Ottoman territories like Cyprus and Egypt.

Leaving these out helps frame Gallipoli as a noble – albeit tragic – “coming of age” for New Zealand. But in reality, ANZAC soldiers were fighting to support Britain’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

2. How are events organised into a plot?

Museums don’t just say “this happened, then that happened”. They link events into a larger plot — a chain of cause and effect that explains how one thing led to another. This can happen through text, but also through spatial layout, lighting, sound and other techniques that guide visitors through rising and falling moments of narrative tension.

Often, museums use familiar plot types to connect events. One common example is the quest narrative — a story in which heroes must navigate unknown terrain, and where mistakes are part of the journey and threaten to derail the mission. It’s a bit like The Lord of the Rings: a journey full of challenges, wrong turns and personal growth.

At Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi, Aotearoa New Zealand’s Treaty story is told using this quest structure. The Treaty is presented as something unique and unfamiliar and the British, confronted with this unknown, fall back on familiar colonial practices — the “mistake” that led to the New Zealand wars.

Because this misstep is treated as part of the learning curve typical of any quest, the exhibition avoids harder questions about this violent part of history, and instead preserves the image of Aotearoa New Zealand as fundamentally tolerant and respectful.

3. Who are the main actors in the story — and who is missing?

Every story needs protagonists, and whose perspective frames the story matters. In many smaller regional museums, history is still told almost entirely from the viewpoint of European settlers. But what about Māori experiences of colonisation? Or the histories of Chinese communities and other migrants who arrived in the 1800s?

By focusing narrowly on European settlers as the main actors, these museums present a one-sided view of the past and construct an image of New Zealand as a European nation — one that expects others to assimilate.

4. How are the main actors characterised — and how are we meant to feel about them?

It’s not surprising that museums portray some actors positively and others less so. What’s more revealing is how certain individuals are elevated as symbols of the nation and how museums invite us to form personal connections with them.

In Te Papa’s Gallipoli exhibition, visitors can open drawers and boxes containing soldiers’ personal belongings. This intimate activity encourages us to feel close to these figures — not just learning about them, but identifying with them as embodying national qualities: bravery, resilience and a commitment to peace.

Why does this matter?

Historical museum narratives aren’t necessarily inaccurate — but, much like historical movies, they are selective. They highlight certain events, actors and cause-and-effect chains to tell a particular kind of story. Often, that story supports a specific idea of what it means to be an Aotearoa New Zealander.

By reading museum exhibitions with a critical eye, visitors can better understand not just the past, but how storytelling shapes national identity in the present — and imagine how it might be shaped differently.

Olli Hellmann, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Waikato

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

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), the organisation responsible for collating and publishing Australia’s music charts, has just announced the biggest overhaul of its methods in more than a decade.

From September, the ARIA charts will be divided according to the release date of entries. Anything older than two years will be moved into a new “ARIA on replay” chart, with the exception of some music re-entering the charts after more than a decade.

The stated aim of the reforms is to better connect Australian audiences with new, and particularly Australian, music. They are part of a series of interventions from different groups aimed at solving the nation’s ongoing music “crisis”.

Why is this happening?

ARIA is responding to two related trends through implementing this new chart system.

The first is that the charts are increasingly dominated by old “catalogue” music. Creative Australia reports the ARIA’s Top 100 charts went from having almost 100% new singles (less than two years old) in 2018, to 70% new singles in 2024.

This is related to a fundamental change in what is being counted.

In 2014, ARIA expanded its sources from point-of-sale data (such as CD sales and iTunes downloads) to include plays on streaming services (such as Spotify and YouTube), which are now the most popular means of music consumption.

People will typically buy a physical/iTunes single or album once. But they might listen to a song on Spotify hundreds of times, and each of these listens count as far as the ARIA charts are concerned.

This explains the resurgence of old releases that find new audiences through media (such as Stranger Things boosting Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill), as well as perennial favourites that never seem to be dislodged (Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album has been in the ARIA Top 50 albums chart for more than 400 weeks).

The second trend is the decline of Australian music in the charts. Research shows the ARIA’s singles and albums charts have become more homogeneous in recent decades, rather than more diversified.

Artists from North America and the United Kingdom are dominating Australian charts more than ever. Many of them sit in the charts for extended periods, at the expense of homegrown talent.

How streaming platforms changed the game

A major challenge for artists on streaming platforms is discoverability, or visibility.

Decisions made by platform-employed playlist curators and AI algorithms aren’t well understood, and are hard to influence. Yet they make a huge difference to how many people will encounter a piece of music.

The inclusion of streaming data in the ARIA charts back in 2014 was presented as a way to more accurately assess what people were listening to.

This new plan to separate old and new releases has a more interventionist agenda, attempting to “remove barriers for new Australian music”.

It can be seen as a response to the overarching narrative of a “crisis” plaguing the Australian music industry – one which extends to existential challenges for live music, and the careers of musicians and other industry workers.

The ARIA’s decision to put their finger on the scales of chart success shows how pressing this crisis narrative has become.

What difference will it make?

Even if Australian artists are better represented in future ARIA charts, material challenges will remain.

Actual sales and streams may remain relatively low. Even with millions of streams, the value returned to artists is often too small to maintain a living.

For most artists, a sustainable music career requires that visibility be translated into other revenue sources, such as live performances, merchandise sales, and media licensing deals.

That said, ARIA’s aim of increasing discoverability for local acts seems likely to have some pay-off. Acts with their names in the new charts will enjoy extra visibility and prestige. If even a small number of opportunities arise from this, it could make a big difference to them, the local industries surrounding them, and the local audiences that will discover them.

ARIA’s intervention is part of a patchwork of responses from industry, government, and communities to Australia’s music woes. Another recent response came from a New South Wales government scheme which will reward overseas headliners (through reduced venue fees) for including an Australian opening act in their show.

State and federal governments are also investing in local music development and export. The surprising exception to this is previous trailblazer Victoria, which recently cut almost all contemporary music funding.

ARIA’s new approach is emphasising the message that Australian music should be valued. Tracking how this approach plays out – as well as which Australian artists benefit – will help ensure a healthy music ecosystem in the future.

Catherine Strong, Associate Professor, Music Industry, RMIT University and Ben Green, Lecturer in Music Industry and Popular Culture, RMIT University

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

After 37 years at the helm, fashion industry heavyweight Anna Wintour is stepping down from her position as editor-in-chief of American Vogue.

It’s not a retirement, though, as Wintour will maintain a leadership position at global fashion and lifestyle publisher Condé Nast (the owner of Vogue and other publications, such as Vanity Fair and Glamour).

Nonetheless, Wintour’s departure from the US edition of the magazine is a big moment for the fashion industry – one which she has single-handedly changed forever.

Fashion mag fever

Fashion magazines as we know them today were first formalised in the 19th century. They helped establish the “trickle down theory” of fashion, wherein trends were traditionally dictated by certain industry elites, including major magazine editors.

In Australia, getting your hands on a monthly issue meant rare exposure to the latest European or American fashion trends.

Vogue itself was established in New York in 1892 by businessman Arthur Baldwin Turnure. The magazine targeted the city’s elite class, initially covering various aspects of high-society life. In 1909, Vogue was acquired by Condé Nast. From then, the magazine increasingly cemented itself as a cornerstone of the fashion publishing.

The period following the second world war particularly opened the doors to mass fashion consumerism and an expanding fashion magazine culture.

Wintour came on as editor of Vogue in 1988, at which point the magazine became less conservative, and more culturally significant.

Not afraid to break the mould

Fashion publishing changed as a result of Wintour’s bold editorial choices – especially when it came to the magazine’s covers. Her choices both reflected, and dictated, shifts in fashion culture.

Wintour’s first cover at Vogue, published in 1988, mixed couture garments (Christian Lacroix) with mainstream brands (stonewashed Guess jeans) – something which had never been done before. It was also the first time a Vogue cover had featured jeans at all – perfectly setting the scene for a long career spent pushing the magazine into new domains.

Wintour also pioneered the centring of celebrities (rather than just models) within fashion discourse. And while she leveraged big names such as Beyonce, Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Kate Moss, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, she also featured rising stars as cover models – often helping propel their careers in the process.

Wintour’s legacy at Vogue involved elevating fashion from a frivolous runway to a powerful industry, which is not scared to make a statement. Nowhere is this truer than at the Met Gala, which is held each year to celebrate the opening of a new fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

The event started as a simple fundraiser for the Met in 1948, before being linked to a fashion exhibit for the first time in 1974.

Wintour took over its organisation in 1995. Her focus on securing exclusive celebrity guests helped propel it to the prestigious event it is today.

This year’s theme for the event was Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. In a time where the US faces great political instability, Wintour was celebrated for her role in helping elevate Black history through the event.

Not without controversy

However, while her cultural influence can’t be doubted, Wintour’s legacy at American Vogue is not without fault.

Notably, her ongoing feud with animal rights organisation PETA – due to the her unwavering support for fur – has bubbled in the background since the heydays of the anti-fur movement.

Wintour has been targeted directly by anti-fur activists, both physically (she was hit with a tofu cream pie in 2005 while leaving a Chloe show) and through numerous protests.

This issue was never resolved. Vogue has continued to showcase and feature fur clothing, even as the social license for using animal materials starts to run out.

Fashion continues to grow increasingly political. How magazines such as Vogue will engage with this shift remains to be seen.

A changing media landscape

The rise of fashion blogging in recent decades has led to a wave of fashion influencers, with throngs of followers, who are challenging the unidirectional “trickle-down” structure of the fashion industry.

Today, social media platforms have overtaken traditional media influence both within and outside of fashion. And with this, the power of fashion editors such as Wintour is diminishing significantly.

Many words will flow regarding Wintour’s departure as editor-in-chief, but nowhere near as many as what she oversaw at the helm of the world’s biggest fashion magazine.

Jye Marshall, Lecturer, Fashion Design, School of Design and Architecture, Swinburne University of Technology and Rachel Lamarche-Beauchesne, Senior Lecturer in Fashion Enterprise, Torrens University Australia

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