Have you ever sat with a cup of tea at the end of a weeding session, with a feeling close to happiness? Or returned from the local garden centre with a bag of potting mix and some plants – and soon the sight of your newly planted herbs or flowers makes your heart feel inexplicably lighter?

Perhaps you’re in hospital recovering from surgery, as I was only a little time ago. I regained consciousness in an advanced recovery unit, a dimly lit space with no windows where everything felt slightly surreal and too intense.

I was receiving the best possible care, yet I had a desperate sense of having been cut loose from my life, and even from my body, as it was monitored and medicated throughout the night. Who knows where things might go from here, I thought. Yet I almost didn’t care.

In the morning, I was wheeled away to a room on an upper floor. It was a space flooded with natural light and with a view of a wintry, cloudy sky and distant treetops.

When a friend arrived with a posy of flowers, I found myself smiling for the first time since leaving home. As well as the pleasure of her company, there was a surge of delight at the presence of flowers. Their soft colours soothed something in me that had been clutched tight in fear since my first glimpse of the stark, frankly terrifying operating theatre.

A history of healing

Perhaps now, more than ever, we could all use some green relief, as we deal with a world that seems to only grow more anxiety-inducing and uncertain.

In May, Australians will vote in what has been called “the cost-of-living election”. Housing prices (and homelessness) have soared, too, with one study putting the rise in housing value between March 2020 and February 2024 at 32.5%.

Elsewhere, war rages in Ukraine, Gaza, and other countries, and the world order is wobbling in the wake of the US elections – particularly this week, when Donald Trump’s tariffs sparked a stock market crash not seen since COVID (until he changed his mind yesterday and it recovered) and led to predictions of a recession.

What evidence is there that the natural world can have a healing effect?

In most cultures throughout history, medicine and botany have been closely entwined, and gardens have been associated with healing the body, mind, and spirit. From around the 4th century BCE, Greece had healing centres known as “asclepieia”, after the god of medicine, Asclepius.

In medieval Europe, monasteries kept medicinal gardens. In England, hospitals and asylums were set within landscaped grounds in the belief the tranquillity of the setting played an important role in lifting patients’ mood. Both male and female inmates of 19th-century asylums often worked in the gardens, in what was seen as a healing process administered by the place itself.

Inevitably, the creep of urbanisation saw the garden landscapes of many such institutions greatly reduced, yet the health benefits to patients of connecting with nature remains undiminished.

Flowers and healing

An explanation for the uplifting effect of those flowers in my hospital room may be found in numerous studies that have shown, post-surgery, patients in rooms with plants and flowers have shorter recovery times, require fewer analgesics, and experience lower levels of anxiety. Partly, it is a response to beauty.

As psychiatrist Sue Stuart-Smith writes in The Well Gardened Mind, the human response to beauty involves brain pathways “associated with our dopamine, serotonin, and endogenous opioid systems and damp down our fear and stress responses”. She continues: “Beauty calms and revitalises us at the same time.” We humans have an affinity for patterns and order, she writes. “The simple geometrics we find in nature are perhaps most concentrated and compelling in the beauty of a flower’s form.”

There has been a trend towards banning flowers from hospital wards, on health grounds. Reasons include a suspicion bacteria lurk in the flower water, as well as safety concerns around patients or nursing staff knocking over vases during night shifts.

Florence Nightingale, in her Notes on Nursing, commented on the beneficial effects of flowers on her patients. She added that they recovered more quickly if they could spend time outside, or at least had a room with adequate natural light. “It is a curious thing to observe how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly as plants always make their way towards the light.” Even if lying on a particular side caused pain, patients still preferred it, Nightingale noted – because “it is the side towards the window”.

Our compulsion to turn towards the natural world is known as “biophilia”. The term was first coined in the 1960s, by German–American social psychologist and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. He described it as “the passionate love of life and all that is alive”, speculating that our separation from nature brings about a level of unrecognised distress.

In the 1980s, biologist and ecologist Edward O. Wilson, in his book Biophilia, asserted that all humans share an affinity with the natural world. “The urge to affiliate with other forms of life is to some degree innate,” he wrote.

In hospital, as my body began its tentative recovery from the shock of surgery, I remembered a line popularly attributed to the French Impressionist painter, Claude Monet: “What I need most are flowers, always, and always.” Through his paintings, notably his studies of waterlilies, and the garden he established at Giverny, which welcomes visitors to the present day, Monet’s flowers continue to calm and revive us with their transcendent beauty.

Perhaps the simplest way to forge a connection with nature lies in our own suburban gardens, if we are lucky enough to have them. Aside from the pleasure of creating pleasing spaces, contact with the soil bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae has been shown to trigger the release of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin, a natural antidepressant, strengthens the immune system. An added bonus is that when we harvest edible plants, our brain releases dopamine, flushing our systems with a gentle rush of satisfaction and pleasure.

Regular doses of serotonin and dopamine were never more needed than during the pandemic, when lockdowns unleashed a sudden fervour for gardening.

In her book The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes that “over the course of 2020, three million people in Britain began to garden for the first time, over half of them under forty-five”. And it wasn’t just in Britain, where garden centres ran out of plants and compost as people set to work transforming the spaces where they were confined.

Australia experienced a similar surge in interest, with the ABC reporting sales of herb and vegetable plants shot up 27%, joining toilet paper and pasta on the list of panic buys. In the United States, Laing writes, 18.3 million people started gardening, “many of them millennials”. American seed company W. Atlee Burpee “reported more sales in the first March of lockdown than at any other time in its 144-year history”.

Laing writes:

crouched on the threshold of unimaginable disaster, death toll soaring, no cure in sight – it was reassuring to see the evidence of time proceeding as it was meant to, seeds unfurling, buds breaking, daffodils pushing through the soil; a covenant of how the world should be and might again.

It is precisely this “evidence of time proceeding as it was meant to” that has the power to hold humans calmly in place. We may imagine we want more than this from life; despising dullness, we think we crave excitement and change. But given the option, few would choose to wake to an Orwellian “bright cold day in April” to find “the clocks were striking thirteen”, which is how it felt during those nightmarish early days of the COVID-19 crisis.

Life on earth does still feel somewhat bright and cold, its future somewhat bleak; it is as if Orwell’s dystopian vision is at last catching up with us.

Who would believe an activity so apparently humble as gardening could come to the rescue of millions of stressed and fearful people? Yet gardeners seem to know this instinctively.

Tending ourselves

In the book In Kiltumper: a Year in an Irish Garden, co-written with her husband, Niall Williams, Irish writer and gardener Christine Breen describes the ordeal of undergoing cancer treatment through the Irish healthcare system. Following an oncology appointment in Galway, the couple drives home towards west Clare, or as Christine puts it: “back to the garden, where there is safety”.

Christine’s husband Niall confirms that, although the medical community might dismiss the healing power of working in a garden as “airey-fairy”, in Christine’s case, even while weak from chemotherapy, “going about the flower beds, trying to do exactly the same work she had always done” meant continuity.

It represented “carrying on living, because that is one of the prime lessons any garden teaches you: the garden grows on”. He speculates that after many years together, garden and gardener become one: “when we tend it, we tend some part of ourselves”.

If we know this, we too often forget. Consequently, garden centres rarely top the list of most desirable destinations, and gardening has been traditionally represented as fussy and domestic. Weeding and mowing are seen as chores that, if possible, are to be avoided.

In her book Why Women Grow, Alice Vincent writes that gardening has “so many associations, of neatness and nicety; a prissiness that feels deeply removed […] from the sex and death and life on show in every growing thing.” She writes: “When we garden, we change how a small part of the world works.”

Doubtless, it was this sense of being able to change one’s world, of seizing control, that appealed to so many of us during the pandemic. And if we got our hands into the soil, we were rewarded with much-needed infusions of serotonin.

In literature, too, people suffering physically or mentally, or both, have often sought refuge or found solace in a garden.

For many readers, their first encounter with the transformative nature of gardening was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s book, The Secret Garden. In it, a spoilt yet neglected child, Mary Lennox, is orphaned in India when her parents and their servants succumb to cholera. She is bundled off to Yorkshire, England, to a daunting atmosphere of secrecy and neglect at Misselthwaite Manor, into the care of an uncle she has never met. There, Mary soon discovers the key to a garden that has been locked for years following her aunt’s death.

In her efforts to restore life to the neglected garden, Mary herself is restored, gradually shedding the lonely, helpless persona of her Indian childhood. When she discovers the manor’s other tightly held secret – her sickly, bedridden cousin, Colin – Mary manages to get him, too, out of the house and into the garden. The outcome is healing for the children, and eventually for Mary’s grieving uncle.

Green prescriptions

For a real-life example of green relief, in The Well Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart-Smith describes how her grandfather – a submariner in the first world war – was taken prisoner during the Gallipoli campaign. After a series of brutal labour camps in Turkey, the last of them in a cement factory, he eventually escaped.

But after the long journey home he was so severely malnourished he was given only a few months to live. Crucial to regaining his health was the devoted nursing by his fiancée, followed by a year-long horticultural course set up to rehabilitate ex-servicemen.

A psychiatrist as well as a gardener, Stuart-Smith writes of the therapeutic effects of working with our hands in a protected space. She describes how gardening allows our inner and outer worlds “to coexist free from the pressures of everyday life”.

Gardens, she writes, are an “in-between space which can be a meeting place for our innermost, dream-infused selves and the real physical world”. In a garden, we are able to hear and process our own, sometimes turbulent, thoughts.

In 1986, after being diagnosed HIV positive, the English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman retreated to the Kent coast near the nuclear power station at Dungeness. In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes that at Prospect Cottage, Jarman

began with stones, not plants: the grey flints he called dragon’s teeth, revealed by the tide on morning walks.

Gradually he established a garden in the inhospitable soil, seeing it as “a therapy and a pharmacopoeia” – and “a place of total absorption”.

It was this capacity to slow or stop time, as much as its wild and sportive beauty, that made it such a paradise-haunted place.

The pandemic spread waves of turbulence across the globe. In April 2021, as part of its post-COVID recovery plan, the government of the United Kingdom launched a two-year green social prescription pilot.

Project-managed by the National Health Service, the program worked across seven test sites: areas disproportionately affected by the pandemic. These included people living in deprived areas and people with mental health conditions, many of them from ethnic minority communities.

Over the course of the two-year program, more than 8,500 people were referred to a green social prescribing activity. Green networks were established in all seven test sites. Findings showed positive improvements in mental health and wellbeing – and green social prescribing is ongoing, proof of the program’s lasting impact.

In recent times, doctors in some countries are writing green prescriptions, rather than scripts for medication. And not just for mental health problems, but for physical conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and lung diseases.

In the late 1990s, New Zealand became one of the first countries where GPs used green prescriptions to encourage patients to increase their levels of physical activity. Japanese clinicians have been advocating “shinrin-yoku”, or forest bathing for decades. In Finland, with its long dark winters, five hours a month is regarded as a “minimum dose” of contact with nature.

Aside from the physical benefits, time spent in a garden can provide a mood boost for those of us who feel oppressed by calendars, and by clock time’s relentless march. In her 2018 memoir Life in the Garden, Penelope Lively writes:

To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time. You garden today for tomorrow, the garden mutates from season to season, always the same but always different.

Perhaps no group of people stands in greater need of time-defiance than those of us entering the final decades of our lives. Time is short, and we know it. But as now 92-year-old Lively wrote seven years ago: “A garden is never just now; it suggests yesterday and tomorrow; it does not allow time its steady progress.”

Gardening as defiance

My mother pottered in her garden until she was in her early 90s, pruning roses, pulling weeds, planting annuals and throwing down fertiliser. She’d wrestle her walker across the lawn to perch on its seat while she did the watering, before retreating to an armchair in the back room of her house, from where she could admire her achievements.

Gardening in extreme old age was, for her, an act of defiance – against time, and against her children, who nagged about the possibility of a fall and insisted she wear an emergency call button. It was a defiance, too, of the common view that old people should relinquish their homes with gardens and move into something more manageable.

On the face of it, not having a garden to maintain in old age makes perfect sense, but it may come at the expense of our human impulse to seek connection with living things, specifically those in the natural world. So ingrained is our instinct to connect with nature, it appears to survive even when other systems and connections have broken down.

A friend whose Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband is in residential care reports he is constantly finding odd containers, filling them with soil, and planting cuttings gathered from the care home’s garden. He crams them onto his windowsill, even planting in teacups when there is nothing else to hand.

Accustomed to gardening throughout his adult life, his impulse to work with living things persists in defiance of dementia. My friend reflects her mother used to do the same, only she would take pieces from the home’s fake indoor plants, then complain bitterly when they did not grow.

In the care facility my friend visits daily, women pick flowers in the grounds to decorate their walkers, and when there are no flowers they’ll use pictures of flowers cut from magazines. Cutting out paper flowers seems like the action of someone whose garden has been lost, but who still feels a powerful desire to connect with beauty and the natural world.

Imagined gardens

The theories of 20th-century historian Theodore Roszak, in his book The Voice of The Earth, founded the ecopsychology movement.

He believed “humans connect with nature through the ecological unconscious, which is the core of human identity”. Human nature, he wrote, is “densely embedded in the world we share with animal, vegetable, mineral”. He believed reconnecting with nature helps people become more aware of their connection to all living things.

So what are we to do if the garden has been lost?

The French writer Colette, whose books were full of botanical detail, did not cease gardening even when age and arthritis kept her bedridden. Rather than physical gardens, Colette roamed imagined gardens.

There is nothing so terrible about not having a garden any more. The worrying thing would be if the future garden, whose reality is of no importance, were beyond my grasp. But it is not.

Colette planned her “tomorrow garden”, specifying pansies “with wide faces, beards, and moustaches – that look like Henry VIII”. Nothing is too difficult for the imaginative gardener. “An arbour? Naturally I shall have an arbour. I’m not down to my last arbour yet.”

Imagining a garden may seem fanciful. Yet it is less so if considered in the context of embodied semantics – a process where brain connectivity during a thought-about action mirrors the connectivity that occurs during the actual action. (For example, thinking about running or swimming can trigger some of the same neural connections as the physical actions.)

It’s been shown that habitual negativity rewires the brain. Ultimately, it damages it by shrinking the hippocampus: one of the main areas destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease.

But gardens, with their earth-centred sense of time and season, are optimistic places. Watching things grow, deadheading spent flowers and saving seed for the return of spring, are just some of the forward-looking aspects of gardening and perhaps it works as well if the plants and flowers are imagined.

It is logical to go further and ask whether a positive habit, such as imagining a garden, has the potential to help rewire one’s brain in a good way. Imagined gardening is really a form of self-guided imagery, a practice with many applications in the treatment of pain, stress, anxiety and depression.

As we age, ideally we would find ways of getting our hands into the healing soil. Suggestions for gardening in old age, and extreme old age, include introducing raised beds to reduce bending, or working with potted plants.

A friend in her late 70s, with an enviable garden, swears by her Garden Group. Around a dozen friends come together for working bees in each other’s gardens. “You can get a huge amount done in an hour-and-a-half,” she says. Afterwards, they share morning tea – so it is a social as well as practical endeavour. My own best tip is to garden little and often. Committing to half an hour a day, or even 15 minutes, adds up nicely over the course of a week.

American poet May Sarton wrote of gardening as “an instrument of grace”. She regarded the natural world as the great teacher. From the Benedictine Monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his mother: “But for one’s health, as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.”

Like Monet, Van Gogh needed flowers. We all do. It’s just that many of us forget this during the push and pull of daily life. And in forgetting, we lose touch with our biophilic natures.

Carol Lefevre, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide

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

“Avoid screens before bed” is one of the most common pieces of sleep advice. But what if the real problem isn’t screen time − it’s the way we use social media at night?

Sleep deprivation is one of the most widespread yet overlooked public health issues, especially among young adults and adolescents.

Despite needing eight to 10 hours of sleep, most adolescents fall short, while nearly two-thirds of young adults regularly get less than the recommended seven to nine hours.

Poor sleep isn’t just about feeling tired − it’s linked to worsened mental health, emotion regulation, memory, academic performance and even increased risk for chronic illness and early mortality.

At the same time, social media is nearly universal among young adults, with 84% using at least one platform daily. While research has long focused on screen time as the culprit for poor sleep, growing evidence suggests that how often people check social media − and how emotionally engaged they are − matters even more than how long they spend online.

As a social psychologist and sleep researcher, I study how social behaviors, including social media habits, affect sleep and well-being. Sleep isn’t just an individual behavior; it’s shaped by our social environments and relationships.

And one of the most common yet underestimated factors shaping modern sleep? How we engage with social media before bed.

Emotional investment in social media

Beyond simply measuring time spent on social media, researchers have started looking at how emotionally connected people feel to their social media use.

Some studies suggest that the way people emotionally engage with social media may have a greater impact on sleep quality than the total time they spend online.

In a 2024 study of 830 young adults, my colleagues and I examined how different types of social media engagement predicted sleep problems. We found that frequent social media visits and emotional investment were stronger predictors of poor sleep than total screen time. Additionally, presleep cognitive arousal and social comparison played a key role in linking social media engagement to sleep disruption, suggesting that social media’s effects on sleep extend beyond simple screen exposure.

I believe these findings suggest that cutting screen time alone may not be enough − reducing how often people check social media and how emotionally connected they feel to it may be more effective in promoting healthier sleep habits.

How social media disrupts sleep

If you’ve ever struggled to fall asleep after scrolling through social media, it’s not just the screen keeping you awake. While blue light can delay melatonin production, my team’s research and that of others suggests that the way people interact with social media may play an even bigger role in sleep disruption.

Here are some of the biggest ways social media interferes with your sleep:

• Presleep arousal: Doomscrolling and emotionally charged content on social media keeps your brain in a state of heightened alertness, making it harder to relax and fall asleep. Whether it’s political debates, distressing news or even exciting personal updates, emotionally stimulating content can trigger increased cognitive and physiological arousal that delays sleep onset.

• Social comparison: Viewing idealized social media posts before bed can lead to upward social comparison, increasing stress and making it harder to sleep. People tend to compare themselves to highly curated versions of others’ lives − vacations, fitness progress, career milestones − which can lead to feelings of inadequacy and anxiety that disrupt sleep.

• Habitual checking: Social media use after lights out is a strong predictor of poor sleep, as checking notifications and scrolling before bed can quickly become an automatic habit. Studies have shown that nighttime-specific social media use, especially after lights are out, is linked to shorter sleep duration, later bedtimes and lower sleep quality. This pattern reflects bedtime procrastination, where people delay sleep despite knowing it would be better for their health and well-being.

• Fear of missing out, or FOMO: The urge to stay connected also keeps many people scrolling long past their intended bedtime, making sleep feel secondary to staying updated. Research shows that higher FOMO levels are linked to more frequent nighttime social media use and poorer sleep quality. The anticipation of new messages, posts or updates can create a sense of social pressure to stay online and reinforce the habit of delaying sleep.

Taken together, these factors make social media more than just a passive distraction − it becomes an active barrier to restful sleep. In other words, that late-night scroll isn’t harmless − it’s quietly rewiring your sleep and well-being.

How to use social media without sleep disruption

You don’t need to quit social media, but restructuring how you engage with it at night could help. Research suggests that small behavioral changes to your bedtime routine can make a significant difference in sleep quality. I suggest trying these practical, evidence-backed strategies for improving your sleep:

• Give your brain time to wind down: Avoid emotionally charged content 30 to 60 minutes before bed to help your mind relax and prepare for sleep.

• Create separation between social media and sleep: Set your phone to “Do Not Disturb” or leave it outside the bedroom to avoid the temptation of late-night checking.

• Reduce mindless scrolling: If you catch yourself endlessly refreshing, take a small, mindful pause and ask yourself: “Do I actually want to be on this app right now?”

A brief moment of awareness can help break the habit loop.

Brian N. Chin, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Trinity College

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

About 14% of Australians experienced personal fraud last year. Of these, 2.1 million experienced credit card fraud, 675,300 were caught in a scam, 255,000 had their identities stolen and 433,000 were impersonated online.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics latest Personal Fraud Survey, between July 2023 and June 2024, Australians lost A$2.1 billion through credit card fraud.

This was up almost 9% from the previous year. Even after reimbursements, the loss was still $477 million.

These figures do not include financial loss through identity theft, or phishing, romance, computer support and dodgy financial advice scams.

Why the increase?

Research shows the more frequently we use technology, the more likely we are to be scammed. Monica Whitty from the Cyber Security Centre, University of Warwick, found victims of cyber-frauds were more likely to score high on impulsivity measures like ‘urgency’ and engage in more frequent online routine activities that place them at great risk of becoming scammed.

We communicate via email, we shop online, use dating apps and allow technicians to remotely access our computers. Meanwhile, amazing “get rich quick” opportunities are apparently being liked by our friends on our socials almost every day.

But too many of us do not stop and think, “is this legitimate?” It is no wonder we see personal fraud and scams increase every year.

While the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures suggest older Australians (aged 45 and over) are more exposed to card fraud, research has found demographics are not a significant predictor of fraud victimisation.

Taking risks

Being too trusting, drives complacency, which produces gullibility. Think about an online dating sites. The site uses a multi-factor authenticator, it requires you to authenticate your photo, password protect your profile and read the scam warnings.

A site’s apparent legitimacy increases your trust. Research has found if you perceive a platform to be legitimate you could be exposed to romance fraud. Fraudsters may be operating within a site, even if it is legitimate.

Another strong predictor of exposure to online fraud is self-control. Self-control theory predicts individuals with low self-control tend to pursue their own self-interest without considering the negative consequences.

Simply, if the investment scheme looks “too good”, they will mostly likely click on the link and get scammed.

Giving away too much

Some individuals are prone to self-disclosing personal information online – and scammers love personal information. Self-disclosure is defined as the amount of information a person decides to make common knowledge.

Sometimes, we disclose, even when we don’t intend to. A common phishing technique on social media is status updates that read, “Your porn star name is your first pet’s name and the first street you lived on.”

They’re interesting, funny and bring on a healthy dose of nostalgia, but the answers to those questions that you tap in for all to see are also most likely to be your security questions on your bank accounts.

The most common scams in 2023-2024:

• Buying or selling scams (1.4% or 308,200)
• Information request or phishing scams (0.7% or 148,800)

What is the government doing to protect me?

The Australian government recently passed legislation which targets scams. It places increased responsibilities on banking and finance, telecommunications and digital platforms organisations to protect customers.

Suspicious numbers can now be accompanied a warning of “potential fraud” on your smartphone screen. Banks are also informing customers about the latest scams. Some banking transactions can verify the identity of the payment recipient, to ensure the details you have match the actual account holder.

While these will not stop all scams, they are a step towards reducing the number of victims and the amount of money lost to fraudulent approaches.

Six steps to protect yourself

There are some small but powerful steps we can all take to reduce the likelihood of financial harm.

1. Passwords: it is important to have strong, unique passwords across your accounts. Using a password manager can help with this.

2. Multi-factor authentication: many platforms will allow you to add extra layers of security to your account by using one-time passwords, authenticator apps, or tokens.

3. Review privacy settings: be aware of the different settings on your accounts and ensure you are in control of what information you provide and what can be accessed by others.

4. Be vigilant: know what you see and hear may not be real. The person or company you are communicating with may not be authentic. It is okay to be sceptical and take time to do your own checks.

5. Money transfers: never send money you are not willing to lose. Too often, people will send money before realising it is a scam. Never feel rushed or forced into any financial decision. It is OK to say no.

6. Credit monitoring: if you know or suspect you have been scammed, you can enact a credit ban, meaning no one can access your details or take further action in your name. This can be a good short-term solution.

And if you are scammed …

Anyone can report money lost in a scam to ReportCyber, the Australian online police reporting portal for cyber incidents. If you have received scam texts or emails, you can report these to Scamwatch, to assist with education and awareness activities.

Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology

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

Young Australians will shape the upcoming federal election. For the first time, Gen Z and Millennials are the dominant voter bloc, outnumbering Baby Boomers.

But over the past couple of years, we’ve heard stories from around the world about how Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) are discontent with democracy. In the United States, just 62% of Gen Z voters believe living in a democracy is important, compared with nearly 90% of other generations.

Globally, more than one in three young people support a strong leader who disregards parliaments and elections. This proportion is higher than among any older generation.

Our recent research suggests Gen Z Australians aren’t immune to feeling disengaged with democracy. In fact, we found high rates of political disaffection among the country’s youngest voters, and those who didn’t vote, at the last federal election.

Our research

On the face of it, the situation seems better in Australia than elsewhere. According to Australian Election Study data, more than 85% of Gen Z voted at the 2022 federal election.

And, again according to the study, the majority seem content with mainstream parties. While Gen Z people support the Greens and minor parties more than their elders, around 60% of them voted for the Labor Party and the Coalition in 2022.

But we wanted to dig deeper. So in 2023, we asked around 1,500 Gen Z Australians nationwide whether they voted or not in 2022, and why.

This enabled us to look at three distinct groups: those who voted; those who enrolled but did not vote (whom we call “abstainers”); and those who did not enrol to vote at all (whom we call “unregistered”).

We found almost half of Gen Z who voted said the main reason was not out of a sense of duty or to support a party, but simply to avoid getting fined.

While our survey can’t say how this compares to other generations, we know from the 2022 election study that 63% of Gen Z adults said they would have voted even if not compulsory, compared with almost 90% of other generations.

Our research also shows almost a third of Gen Z citizens who didn’t register to vote said they either didn’t know they had to or they didn’t know how. This is troubling, given the efforts of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to get everyone on the roll.

Those who don’t vote

Our survey revealed if you’re a Gen Z Australian who didn’t vote (whether as abstainer or unregistered), you’re more likely to be unemployed, less politically interested and have less faith in democracy as the best system of government. You’re also more likely to have been born outside Australia.

More than 50% of abstainers and 70% of unregistered Gen Z attributed their non-participation to a sense of disengagement, either from the whole political process or from parties and politicians specifically.

Not participating, however, doesn’t mean you’re entirely alienated from society. Non-voters in our study are actually more likely to be members of organisations such as charities or church groups. But they are more alienated from the democratic process.

Curiously, we found non-voters were no more likely than voters to hold negative views towards political parties. When asked questions such as whether they agreed that “parties do not care about people like me” and “parties are all the same”, there were no significant differences between these two groups.

While this may sound like good news for parties, the less cheerful reality is the lack of difference is because Gen Z voters are just as sceptical as non-voters about political parties.

So why does Gen Z vote?

Enthusiasm towards parties has little to do with why Gen Z goes to the ballot box. Just 11% of them said the main reason they turned out in 2022 was because “there was a party or candidate I wanted to vote for”.

Only around one in five said their primary motivation was because “I thought that voting makes a difference”.

Instead, by far the most important reason for casting a vote was “I did not want to get fined”. This was the main driver for 47% of Gen Z Australians.

On one hand, this seems like a great advertisement for compulsory voting with enforced penalties. Even a small fine like the $20 for not voting in a federal election is enough to get many Gen Z people to vote.

On the other, if the key motivation is just to avoid a fine, it’s not a great sign of a healthy democracy.

What can be done?

Based on our research, there are a few things that might engage Gen Z more with parties and democracy.

One is better information. Our survey showed there are still some Gen Z people who don’t know about their obligation to register or how to do it. The AEC has made great strides in increasing youth enrolment over the past decade, but there remains work to be done.

Being present on the platforms Gen Z use to get their news might help. From that perspective, the AEC’s decision to join TikTok earlier this year was a wise one.

Ultimately, the main onus lies with the political parties. If Gen Z are not motivated to support them, perhaps this tells us more about how parties engage with young people and their concerns, than it does about young people themselves.

If the major parties can devote more attention to what matters to Gen Z, such as the cost of living, rent affordability, and climate change, they would not only address what are objectively pressing issues – they might also help reconnect young generations with politics and democracy.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said the Australian Electoral Commission didn’t have a TikTok account. The copy has been updated to reflect that the AEC joined the platform earlier this year._

Sofia Ammassari, Research Fellow, Griffith University; Duncan McDonnell, Professor of Politics, Griffith University, and Ferran Martinez i Coma, Professor in Political Science, Griffith University

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

Australians are being urged to roll up their sleeves for a flu vaccine amid rising cases of influenza.

It’s an opportune time to think about other vaccines too, particularly because some vaccines can be given at the same time as the flu vaccine.

One is the COVID vaccine.

Should you get another COVID shot?

More than five years since COVID was declared a pandemic, we hear much less about this virus. But it’s still around.

In 2024 there were 4,953 deaths involving COVID. This is nearly 20% lower than in 2023, but still nearly five times that of influenza (1,002).

Vaccines, which do a very good job at reducing the chances of severe COVID, remain an important tool in our ongoing battle against the virus.

Case numbers don’t tell us as much about COVID anymore as fewer people are testing. But based on other ways we monitor the virus, such as cases in ICU and active outbreaks in residential aged care homes, there have essentially been two peaks a year over recent years – one over summer and one over winter.

This doesn’t mean we can predict exactly when another wave will happen, but it’s inevitable and may well be within the next few months. So it’s worth considering another COVID vaccine if you’re eligible.

Who can get one, and when?

There are several risk factors for more severe COVID, but some of the most important include being older or immunocompromised. For this reason, people aged 75 and older are recommended to receive a COVID booster every six months.

In the slightly younger 65 to 74 age bracket, or adults aged 18 to 64 who are immunocompromised, booster doses are recommended every 12 months, but people are eligible every six months.

Healthy adults under 65 are eligible for a booster dose every 12 months.

Healthy children aren’t recommended to receive boosters but those who are severely immunocompromised may be eligible.

What COVID shots are currently available?

We’ve seen multiple types of COVID vaccines since they first became available about four years ago. Over time, different vaccines have targeted different variants as the virus has evolved.

While some vaccine providers may still offer other options, such as the older booster that targeted the Omicron variant XBB.1.5, the recent JN.1 booster is the most up-to-date and best option.

This is a relatively recently updated version to improve protection against some of the newer strains of COVID that are circulating. The new booster only became available in Australia in late 2024.

This booster, as the name suggests, targets a subvariant called JN.1. Although JN.1 has not been the dominant subvariant in Australia for some time, this shot is still expected to provide good protection against circulating subvariants, including new subvariants such as LP.8.1, which is descended from JN.1.

While it’s great we have an updated booster available, unfortunately uptake remains poor. Only 17.3% of people 75 and over had received a COVID vaccine in the six months to March.

Getting a flu and COVID shot together

Data from more than 17,000 people who completed a survey after receiving the JN.1 booster shows that while 27% reported at least one adverse event following vaccination, the majority of these were mild, such as local pain or redness or fatigue.

Only 4% of people reported an impact on their routine activities following vaccination, such as missing school or work.

If you choose to get the flu vaccine and the COVID vaccine at the same time, they’ll usually be given in different arms. There shouldn’t be a significant increase in side effects. What’s more, getting both shots at the same time doesn’t reduce your immune response against either vaccine.

Now is the ideal time to get your flu vaccine. If you’re eligible for a COVID booster as well, getting both vaccines at the same time is safe and can be very convenient.

We’re conducting trials in Australia, as are scientists elsewhere, of combined vaccines. One day these could allow vaccination against COVID and flu in a single shot – but these are still a way off.

If you’re not sure about your eligibility or have any questions about either vaccine, discuss this with your GP, specialist of pharmacist. Australian state and federal government websites also provide reliable information.

Paul Griffin, Professor, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, The University of Queensland

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

You may have seen ads by Apple promoting its new Clean Up feature that can be used to remove elements in a photo. When one of these ads caught my eye this weekend, I was intrigued and updated my software to try it out.

The feature has been available in Australia since December for Apple customers with certain hardware and software capabilities. It’s also available for customers in New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The tool uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the scene and suggest elements that might be distracting. You can see those highlighted in the screenshot below.

You can then tap the suggested element to remove it or circle elements to delete them. The device then uses generative AI to try to create a logical replacement based on the surrounding area.

Easier ways to deceive

Smartphone photo editing apps have been around for more than a decade, but now, you don’t need to download, pay for, or learn to use a new third-party app. If you have an eligible device, you can use these features directly in your smartphone’s default photo app.

Apple’s Clean Up joins a number of similar tools already offered by various tech companies. Those with Android phones might have used Google’s Magic Editor. This lets users move, resize, recolour or delete objects using AI. Users with select Samsung devices can use their built-in photo gallery app to remove elements in photos.

There have always been ways – analogue and, more recently, digital – to deceive. But integrating them into existing software in a free, easy-to-use way makes those possibilities so much easier.

Using AI to edit photos or create new images entirely raises pressing questions around the trustworthiness of photographs and videos. We rely on the vision these devices produce in everything from police body and traffic cams to insurance claims and verifying the safe delivery of parcels.

If advances in tech are eroding our trust in pictures and even video, we have to rethink what it means to trust our eyes.

How can these tools be used?

The idea of removing distracting or unwanted elements can be attractive. If you’ve ever been to a crowded tourist hotspot, removing some of the other tourists so you can focus more on the environment might be appealing (check out the slider below for an example).

But beyond removing distractions, how else can these tools be used?

Some people use them to remove watermarks. Watermarks are typically added by photographers or companies trying to protect their work from unauthorised use. Removing these makes the unauthorised use less obvious but not less legal.

Others use them to alter evidence. For example, a seller might edit a photo of a damaged good to allege it was in good condition before shipping.

As image editing and generating tools become more widespread and easier to use, the list of uses balloons proportionately. And some of these uses can be unsavoury.

AI generators can now make realistic-looking receipts, for example. People could then try to submit these to their employer to get reimbursed for expenses not actually incurred.

Can anything we see be trusted anymore?

Considering these developments, what does it mean to have “visual proof” of something?

If you think a photo might be edited, zooming in can sometimes reveal anomalies where the AI has stuffed up. Here’s a zoomed-in version of some of the areas where the Clean Up feature generated new content that doesn’t quite match the old.

It’s usually easier to manipulate one image than to convincingly edit multiple images of the same scene in the same way. For this reason, asking to see multiple outtakes that show the same scene from different angles can be a helpful verification strategy.

Seeing something with your own eyes might be the best approach, though this isn’t always possible.

Doing some additional research might also help. For example, with the case of a fake receipt, does the restaurant even exist? Was it open on the day shown on the receipt? Does the menu offer the items allegedly sold? Does the tax rate match the local area’s?

Manual verification approaches like the above obviously take time. Trustworthy systems that can automate these mundane tasks are likely to grow in popularity as the risks of AI editing and generation increase.

Likewise, there’s a role for regulators to play in ensuring people don’t misuse AI technology. In the European Union, Apple’s plan to roll out its Apple Intelligence features, which include the Clean Up function, was delayed due to “regulatory uncertainties”.

AI can be used to make our lives easier. Like any technology, it can be used for good or bad. Being aware of what it’s capable of and developing your visual and media literacies is essential to being an informed member of our digital world.

T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

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

Languages are windows into the worlds of the people who speak them – reflecting what they value and experience daily.

So perhaps it’s no surprise different languages highlight different areas of vocabulary. Scholars have noted that Mongolian has many horse-related words, that Maori has many words for ferns, and Japanese has many words related to taste.

Some links are unsurprising, such as German having many words related to beer, or Fijian having many words for fish. The linguist Paul Zinsli wrote an entire book on Swiss-German words related to mountains.

In our recently-published study we took a broad approach towards understanding the links between different languages and concepts.

Using computational methods, we identified areas of vocabulary that are characteristic of specific languages, to provide insight into linguistic and cultural variation.

Our work adds to a growing understanding of language, culture, and the way they both relate.

Our method

We tested 163 links between languages and concepts, drawn from the literature.

We compiled a digital dataset of 1574 bilingual dictionaries that translate between English and 616 different languages. Since many of these dictionaries were still under copyright, we only had access to counts of how often a particular word appeared in each dictionary.

One example of a concept we looked at was “horse”, for which the top-scoring languages included French, German, Kazakh and Mongolian. This means dictionaries in these languages had a relatively high number of

1. words for horses. For instance, Mongolian аргамаг means “a good racing or riding horse”
2. words related to horses. For instance, Mongolian чөдөрлөх means “to hobble a horse”.

However, it is also possible the counts were influenced by “horse” appearing in example sentences for unrelated terms.

Not a hoax after all?

Our findings support most links previously highlighted by researchers, including that Hindi has many words related to love and Japanese has many words related to obligation and duty.

We were especially interested in testing the idea that Inuit languages have many words for snow. This notorious claim has long been distorted and exaggerated. It has even been dismissed as the “great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, with some experts saying it simply isn’t true.

But our results suggest the Inuit snow vocabulary is indeed exceptional. Out of 616 languages, the language with the top score for “snow” was Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. The other two Inuit languages in our data set (Western Canadian Inuktitut and North Alaskan Inupiatun) also achieved high scores for “snow”.

The Eastern Canadian Inuktitut dictionary in our dataset includes terms such as kikalukpok, which means “noisy walking on hard snow”, and apingaut, which means “first snow fall”.

The top 20 languages for “snow” included several other languages of Alaska, such as Ahtena, Dena'ina and Central Alaskan Yupik, as well as Japanese and Scots.

Scots includes terms such as doon-lay, meaning “a heavy fall of snow”, feughter meaning “a sudden, slight fall of snow”, and fuddum, meaning “snow drifting at intervals”.

You can explore our findings using the tool we developed, which allows you to identify the top languages for any given concept, and the top concepts for a particular language.

Language and environment

Although the languages with top scores for “snow” are all spoken in snowy regions, the top-ranked languages for “rain” were not always from the rainiest parts of the world.

For instance, South Africa has a medium level of rainfall, but languages from this region, such as Nyanja, East Taa and Shona, have many rain-related words. This is probably because, unlike snow, rain is important for human survival – which means people still talk about it in its absence.

For speakers of East Taa, rain is both relatively rare and desirable. This is reflected in terms such as lábe ||núu-bâ, an “honorific form of address to thunder to bring rain” and |qába, which refers to the “ritual sprinkling of water or urine to bring rain”.

Our tool can also be used to explore various concepts related to perception (“smell”), emotion (“love”) and cultural beliefs (“ghost”).

The top-scoring languages for “smell” include a cluster of Oceanic languages such as Marshallese, which has terms such as jatbo meaning “smell of damp clothing”, meļļā meaning “smell of blood”, and aelel meaning “smell of fish, lingering on hands, body, or utensils”.

Prior to our research, the smell terms of the Pacific Islands had received little attention.

Some caveats

Although our analysis reveals many interesting links between languages and concepts, the results aren’t always reliable – and should be checked against original dictionaries where possible.

For example, the top concepts for Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German) include von (“of”), den (“the”) and und (“and”) – all of which are unrevealing. We excluded similar words from other languages using Wiktionary, but our method did not filter out these common words for Plautdietsch.

Also, the word counts reflect both dictionary definitions and other elements, such as example sentences. While our analysis excluded words that are especially likely to appear in example sentences (such as “woman” and “father”), such words could have still influenced our results to some extent.

Most importantly, our results run the risk of perpetuating potentially harmful stereotypes if taken at face value. So we urge caution and respect while using the tool. The concepts it lists for any given language provide, at best, a crude reflection of the cultures associated with that language.

Charles Kemp, Professor, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne; Ekaterina Vylomova, Lecturer, Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne; Temuulen Khishigsuren, PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne, and Terry Regier, Professor, Language and Cognition Lab, University of California, Berkeley

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

From dire wolves to woolly mammoths, the idea of resurrecting extinct species has captured the public imagination. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based biotech company leading the charge, has made headlines for ambitious efforts to bring back long-lost animals using cutting edge genetic engineering.

It recently announced the birth of pups with key traits of dire wolves, an iconic predator last seen roaming North America more than 10,000 years ago. This followed on the heels of earlier project announcements focused on the woolly mammoth and the thylacine. This all fuels a sense that de-extinction is not only possible but imminent.

But as the science advances, a deeper question lingers: how close must the result be to count as a true return? If we can only recover fragments of an extinct creature’s genome – and must build the rest with modern substitutes – is that really de-extinction, or are we simply creating lookalikes?

To the public, de-extinction often evokes images of Jurassic Park-style resurrection: a recreation of a lost animal, reborn into the modern world. In scientific circles, however, the term encompasses a variety of techniques: selective breeding, cloning, and increasingly, synthetic biology through genome editing. Synthetic biology is a field that involves redesigning systems found in nature.

Scientists have used selective breeding of modern cattle in attempts to recreate an animal that resembles the auroch, the wild ancestor of today’s breeds. Cloning has been used to briefly bring back the pyrenean ibex, which went extinct in 2000. In 2003, a Spanish team brought a cloned calf to term, but the animal died a few minutes after birth.

This is often cited as the first example of de-extinction. However, the only preserved tissue was from one female animal, meaning it could not have been used to bring back a viable population. Colossal’s work falls into the synthetic biology category.

These approaches differ in method but share a common goal: to restore a species that has been lost. In most cases, what emerges is not an exact genetic copy of the extinct species, but a proxy: a modern organism engineered to resemble its ancestor in function or appearance.

Take the case of the woolly mammoth. Colossal’s project aims to create a cold-adapted Asian elephant that can fulfil the mammoth’s former ecological role. But mammoths and Asian elephants diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago and differ by an estimated 1.5 million genetic variants. Editing all of these is, for now, impossible. Instead, scientists are targeting a few dozen genes linked to key traits like cold resistance, fat storage and hair growth.

Compare that to humans and chimpanzees. Despite a genetic similarity of around 98.8%, the behavioural and physical differences between the two are huge. If comparatively small genetic gaps can produce such major differences, what can we expect when editing only a tiny fraction of the differences between two species? It’s a useful rule of thumb when assessing recent claims.

As discussed in a previous article, Colossal’s dire wolf project involved just 20 genetic edits. These were introduced into the genome of a gray wolf to mimic key traits of the extinct dire wolf. The resulting animals may look the part, but with so few changes, they are genetically much closer to modern wolves than their prehistoric namesake.

Colossal’s ambitions extend beyond mammoths and dire wolves. The company is also working to revive the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), a carnivorous marsupial that was once native to mainland Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. The last example died at Hobart Zoo in 1936. Colossal is using a genetic relative called the fat-tailed dunnart – a tiny marsupial – as the foundation. The goal is to engineer the dunnart’s genome to express traits found in thylacines. The team says it is developing an artificial uterus device to carry the engineered foetus.

Colossal also has a project to revive the dodo, a flightless bird that roamed Mauritius until the 1600s. That project will use the Nicobar pigeon, one of the dodo’s closest living relatives, as a basis for genetic reconstruction.

In each case, the company relies on a partial blueprint: incomplete ancient DNA, and then uses the powerful genome editing tool Crispr to edit specific differences into the genome of a closely related living species. The finished animals, if born, may resemble their extinct counterparts in outward appearance and some behaviour – but they will not be genetically identical. Rather, they will be hybrids, mosaics or functional stand-ins.

That doesn’t negate the value of these projects. In fact, it might be time to update our expectations. If the goal is to restore ecological roles, not to perfectly recreate extinct genomes, then these animals may still serve important functions. But it also means we must be precise in our language. These are synthetic creations, not true returns.

Technology to prevent extinction

There are more grounded examples of near-de-extinction work – most notably the northern white rhinoceros. Only two females remain alive today, and both are infertile. Scientists are working to create viable embryos using preserved genetic material and surrogate mothers from closely related rhino species. This effort involves cloning and assisted reproduction, with the aim of restoring a population genetically identical to the original.

Unlike the mammoth or the thylacine, the northern white rhino still has living representatives and preserved cells. That makes it a fundamentally different case – more conservation biology than synthetic biology. But it shows the potential of this technology when deployed toward preservation, not reconstruction.

Gene editing also holds promise for helping endangered species by using it to introduce genetic diversity into a population, eliminate harmful mutations from species or enhance resilience to disease or climate change. In this sense, the tools of de-extinction may ultimately serve to prevent extinctions, rather than reverse them.

So where does that leave us? Perhaps we need new terms: synthetic proxies, ecological analogues or engineered restorations. These phrases might lack the drama of “de-extinction” but they are closer to the scientific reality.

After all, these animals are not coming back from the dead – they are being invented, piece by piece, from what the past left behind. In the end, it may not matter whether we call them mammoths or woolly elephants, dire wolves or designer dogs. What matters is how we use this power – whether to heal broken ecosystems, to preserve the genetic legacy of vanishing species or simply to prove that we can.

But we should at least be honest: what we’re witnessing isn’t resurrection. It’s reimagination.

Timothy Hearn, Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Anglia Ruskin University

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

Electronic microchips are at the heart of the modern world. They’re found in our laptops, our smartphones, our cars and our household appliances. For years, manufacturers have been making them more powerful and efficient, which increases the performance of our electronic devices.

But that trend is now faltering because of the increased cost and complexity of manufacturing chips, as well as performance limits set by the laws of physics. This is happening just as there’s a need for increased computing power because of the boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

An alternative to the electronic microchips we currently use are photonic chips. These use light instead of electricity to achieve higher performance. However, photonic chips have not yet taken off due to a number of hurdles. Now, two papers published in Nature address some of these roadblocks, offering essential stepping stones to achieving the computing power required by complex artificial intelligence systems.

By using light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) for the transport and processing of information, photonic computing promises higher speeds and greater bandwidths with greater efficiency. This is because it does not suffer from the loss of electrical current due to a phenomenon known as resistance, as well as unwanted heat loss from electrical components.

Photonic computing is also particularly suited for performing what are known as matrix multiplications – mathematical operations that are fundamental to AI.

Those are some of the benefits. The challenges, however, are not trivial. In the past, the performance of photonic chips has generally been studied in isolation. But because of the dominance of electronics in modern technology, photonic hardware will need to be integrated with those electronic systems.

However, converting photons into electrical signals can slow down processing times since light operates at higher speeds. Photonic computing is also based around analogue operations rather than digital ones. This can reduce precision and limit the type of computing tasks that can be carried out.

It’s also difficult to scale them up from small prototypes because large-scale photonic circuits cannot currently be fabricated with sufficient accuracy. Photonic computing will require its own software and algorithms, compounding the challenges of integration and compatibility with other technology.

The two new papers in Nature address many of these hurdles. Bo Peng, from Singapore-based company Lightelligence, and colleagues demonstrate a new type of processor for photonic computing called a Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (Pace). This processor has a low latency, which means that there is a minimal delay between an input or command and the corresponding response or action by the computer.

The large-scale Pace processor, which has more than 16,000 photonic components, can solve difficult computing tasks, demonstrating the feasibility of the system for real world applications. The processor shows how integration of photonic and electronic hardware, accuracy, and the need for different software and algorithms can be resolved. It also demonstrates that the technology can be scaled up.

This marks a significant development, despite some speed limitations of the current hardware.

In a separate paper, Nicholas Harris, from California-based company Lightmatter, and colleagues describe a photonic processor that was able to run two AI systems with accuracy similar to those of conventional electronic processors. The authors demonstrated the effectiveness of their photonic processor through generating Shakespeare-like text, accurately classifying movie reviews and playing classic Atari computer games such as Pac-Man.

The platform is also potentially scalable, though in this case limitations of the materials and engineering used curtailed one measure of the processor’s speed and its overall computational capabilities.

Both teams suggest that their photonic systems can be part of scalable next generation hardware that can support the use of AI. This would finally make photonics viable, though further refinements will be needed. These will involve the use of more effective materials or designs.

Demosthenes Koutsogeorgis, Associate Professor of Photonic Technologies, School of Science & Technology, Nottingham Trent University and Matthew Spink, PhD Researcher, School of Science & Technology, Nottingham Trent University

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

In TikTok’s latest viral beauty trend “the morning shed,” beauty influencers “shed” hair and skin products that have been worn overnight. These include hair styling items, skin masks and creams, and physical products such as chin straps and mouth tape, which are intended to help with breathing through the night and keep away the drooping of the jaw that happens with age.

While this trend has come under fire for alleged unsustainability and over-consumerism, it is only the latest beauty fad in a long line of time and money consuming “hacks” that women have been undertaking for centuries. From tapeworms to tuberculosis, women have taken part in a laundry list of beauty hacks in order to meet appearance ideals, many of which have been dangerous, painful and even deadly.

As far back as the ancient Egyptians, women ground up toxic substances to make eyeliner and eye shadow. These were dangerous when inhaled as a powder (such as during the grinding process) and could cause irritation of the skin when applied. And yet somehow, heavy metal poisoning is among the least dangerous of these historic beauty trends.

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In China, foot binding is an example of a painful and life altering treatment first recorded around the 10th century. The feet were usually bound before the arch of the foot had developed (aged four to nine).

The process involved forcefully curling the toes towards the sole of the foot until the arch broke then the foot would be tightly bandaged to keep it in this position. Small feel were coveted at the time. Thankfully, this practice was banned in the early 1900s after almost 200 years of opposition from both Chinese and western sources.

In Europe, the Renaissance period saw a new wave of beauty hacks, from arsenic baths (which bleach the skin to a near translucent white) to Belladonna drops (literal poison) used on the eyes to induce an aroused or watery-eyed look. Many women who used these tactics ended up poisoned or blind.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, the “English rose” look was all the rage. Women would blood let for a perfectly pale pallor, or paint their faces with “Venetian ceruse” or “Venetian white” – otherwise known as lead paint. The use of Venetian ceruse is one of the suspected causes of death of Elizabeth I.

In the Victorian era and early 1900s, women often engaged in dangerous practices to achieve the coveted pale skin, red lip and small waist that was the height of fashion. This aesthetic could be achieved by contracting tuberculosis (a lung infection that was often fatal), taking tapeworm pills, consuming mercury to look forever young, or chewing arsenic wafers to make skin pale.

My own research has shown that sociocultural pressures to look a certain way are experienced differently across the world. I found that white western women experience some of the highest appearance pressures, followed by east Asian women. Although these decline a little with age for white western women, they persist in Asian women and never reach the lower levels seen elsewhere. I found the lowest levels of sociocultural pressure and the highest levels of body appreciation in Nigeria.

As the “morning shed” proves, women still go to great lengths to meet culturally shaped standards, particularly under conditions of higher economic inequality – something that is getting worse in many countries. For example, in the United States, cities which have higher economic inequality see higher spend on beauty products and services, such as beauty salons or women’s clothing.

With the advent of social media, especially short-form content like TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts, the speed at which beauty trends rise and fall has been expedited and globalised. These trends range from the painful lip suction women undertook to get big lips like the celebrity Kylie Jenner, to the normalisation of botox and fillers, to laser hair removal of every unwanted follicle.

The “morning shed” is just the latest evolution in skin care trends, which started as health-focused, with an emphasis on sun protection and moisturisation. It has since morphed into a study in over-consumption and over-commitment of time and money in the pursuit of staying ever youthful.

Louise N Hanson, PhD in Social and Developmental psychology, Durham University

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

This spring, Babe is returning to cinemas to mark the 30th anniversary of its release in 1995. The much-loved family film tells the deceptively simple but emotionally powerful story of a piglet who saves his bacon through intelligence, kindness and hard work.

Babe becomes the trusted ally of both farmer and farmyard animals and, like so many Hollywood heroes before and since, he refuses to stay in his lane.

It’s a film which, on paper, really shouldn’t work and which sounds alarm bells to any self-respecting children’s literature scholar like me. It takes an expertly crafted English children’s book with tasteful black-and-white illustrations – Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep Pig (1983) – and turns it into an all-singing, all-dancing technicolour extravaganza.

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The film inserts new episodes and characters – an evil cat, a plucky duck and (most alarmingly) a brace of brattish kids. And it replaces a perfectly good, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin book title with the cutesy moniker of the piglet star.

It shouldn’t work … but it really, really does. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the most successful film adaptations of a children’s book of all time.

It met with both commercial and critical success, making over US$254 million at the box office and being nominated for no less than seven Academy Awards, one of which it secured for visual effects.

So, what exactly is so special about Babe? It was one of the first films which, thanks to the then-cutting edge combination of animatronics and visual effects, delivered convincing talking animals who, endowed with the gift of speech, could themselves “look like movie stars”. But with all the jaw-dropping technological advances of the last 30 years, how has this film managed to stand the test of time so well?

The answer in part is that its source material is exceptionally strong. The Sheep Pig is written with restraint and economy, but also great warmth and relish. King-Smith has immense fun, wallowing in words like the proverbial pig in muck, and putting it all to the service of a story whose core values are easy to get behind. The Sheep Pig is a soft-power parable which advocates for brains over brawn, for respectful communication and common decency.

But the excellence of a film’s bookish bedrock is no guarantee of success. Indeed, the brilliance of a book can often be something of a liability. Think of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, or any of the film and TV adaptations of Noel Streatfeild’s superb Ballet Shoes. With Babe, though, the book is catalyst rather than straitjacket, an enabling prompt which initiates a new work of equal strength and quality.

The pacing is well judged, the look of the film lush, and there are several actual laugh-out-loud moments – including the duck’s panicked realisation that “Christmas means carnage!” Above all, it’s a film with immense emotional intelligence and power.

Recognised for its visual effects, it also succeeds in large part because of the strength of its soundscape and score. There’s one scene in particular which really soars, and which takes on the elephant in the room: the human habit of eating pigs.

Babe is so shocked and upset on learning this fact from the evil cat (who else?) that he loses the will not just to win in the sheepdog trial, but to live at all. The supremely taciturn Father Hoggett must act to make amends and save his pig protégé.

In an astonishingly moving act of love, this man of few words takes the sickly and sick-at-heart pig onto his lap and sings to him. At first a gentle crooning, the farmer’s expression of care and affection soon swells to an out-and-out bellow, accompanied by a wild, caution-to-the-wind dance.

It’s difficult to imagine a more lyrically apt song than the 1977 reggae-inflected hit based on the powerful tune of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in C Minor: “If I had words”, it begins. It’s a moment of huge emotional force and intensity, in which the gaping abyss of age and species difference are bridged through music and dance.

James Cromwell as Farmer Hoggett, here and throughout the film, is tremendous, his reserved performance a key factor in its success. The role – which he almost didn’t take because of the paucity of lines – was career-defining, and prompted personal epiphanies which flow naturally from this scene.

First, Cromwell never ate meat again. Second, he has spoken (with visible emotion) of the delivery of the film’s final pithy-but-powerful line of approbation – “That’ll do pig, that’ll do” – as a moment of communion with his father on catching sight of his own artificially aged reflection in the camera lens. “My life changed, and I owe it to a pig,” the actor concludes.

Babe is a film and an adaptation with many qualities. It’s wholesome without ever being sickly. But above all, it has an emotional force which worked on actors and audiences alike and which, 30 years later, remains undiminished.

Kiera Vaclavik, Professor of Children's Literature & Childhood Culture, Queen Mary University of London

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

I had been looking forward to the National Gallery’s exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 for several reasons.

First, it was many years in the making. Its curator, Professor Emerita Joanna Cannon of the Courtauld Institute of Art, had been working on it for a decade or so. Duccio, one of the exhibition’s featured artists and one of the greatest Italian painters of the middle ages, had a major show in Siena in 2003. Another featured artist, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, had a smaller exhibition in the same city in 2017.

Second, the National Gallery’s late medieval Italian paintings had not been seen for two years because of the refurbishment of the Sainsbury Wing. That is, except for a select few displayed in an excellent exhibition on Saint Francis of Assisi in 2023.

Last, there was the publicity generated by the Metropolitan Museum’s iteration of this show – complete with a tantalising video tour by two of its curators.

The National Gallery’s take on the most exciting 50 years of Siena’s artistic production makes the most of its ground floor gallery rooms, enabling conversations between objects and medium.

The exhibition is a remarkable achievement: a pleasure for the eye and commendable for its ability to make medieval religious art accessible.

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Britain’s love affair with Sienese painting is well documented from the late 19th century at least. But this exhibition focuses on much more than the celebrated four painters – Duccio, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his brother Pietro.

The wealth of Siena’s visual culture is represented with illuminated manuscripts; sculptures in marble, ivory, terracotta and walnut; reliquaries (containers for holy relics) and croziers (hooked staves) made from gold and enamel; and rugs and silks.

Panels with protagonists painted in bright reds, blues, pinks and greens with tiny brushstrokes using pigments mixed with egg on gilded backgrounds abound. But there are also frescoes, detached from their original mural setting, yet able to tell the story of their making and meaning.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation (1344) is defined only by lines brushed on wet plaster using a red pigment (sinoper). This was a common initial step to set the composition, over which another layer of plaster would be applied again with contours painted but now filled with colour.

In another room, a beautifully modelled painted head of Jesus split into two, carved by Lando di Pietro (1338), is all that remains of a larger crucifix after bombing by allies in the second world war. It is the only known work of the sculptor. He was identified by the personal handwritten prayers concealed within the sculpture, which are displayed next to it.

The showstoppers

The curators have managed to do what could not be achieved in Siena in 2003: bring Duccio’s three triptychs into a single venue. The first two are shown just a few metres apart, to enable comparison and close viewing of all sides. Their painted backs and the geometric motifs behind their folding wings enable us to understand them as three-dimensional, portable objects.

The Crucifixion triptych, bought by Prince Albert in 1845 and lent to the exhibition by King Charles, is not too far from the pair, inviting comparison.

Duccio’s Healing of the Man Born Blind finds itself reunited with seven of its companions for the first time since 1777. This is the closest reconstruction we’ll ever get of the back predella (a box-like shelf with images that supported the main panels) of Siena cathedral’s enormous double-sided high altarpiece (known as the Maestà), which was carried in procession through the city streets in 1311.

Originally painted on a massive horizontal poplar plank, the individual episodes depicting Jesus’s ministry were sold on the art market in the 19th century and dispersed across two continents. A ninth panel which probably started the narrative has never been found, although you wouldn’t know it from this display.

Nothing can distract from close viewing – you’ll want to enjoy it for as long as you can stand. This privileged view is unusual in an exhibition and possibly comes close to that enjoyed by the clergy during processions or pilgrimages in Siena cathedral. A photo montage of the reconstructed altarpiece is tiny and displayed on the wall opposite the reconstructed predella, alongside the panels originally on the front predella.

The other showstopper is Pietro Lorenzetti’s altarpiece. It’s usually on the high altar of the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo, but has been lent by the diocese and placed on a low plinth. This allows us to imagine just how immense Duccio’s Maestà must have been.

This altarpiece represents the most popular formula created in early 14th-century Siena. These were large polyptychs of five (or seven) vertical panels usually displaying the virgin and child in the centre, surrounded by saints relevant to the locality and patrons.

The Arezzo polyptych is approximately three metres in height and width, with three registers but has lost its predella, having been dismantled and relocated several times. The type was so popular that it, and the Sienese painters who created it, were in demand throughout Tuscany and beyond.

Each of the objects displayed in this exhibition merits a long look. Since there are over 100, my last reflection will be on another extraordinary reunion: a small gilded glass icon depicting once again the virgin, child and saints above the Annunciation (1347). Its double-sided reliquary frame still contains 17 relics.

It’s conceived as a miniature altarpiece, imitating the basic shape of the larger Sienese altarpieces on display. It also uses the same materials in addition to glass that has been gilded, incised and painted in red, blue and green.

Such precious materials and meticulous craft testify to the richness of Sienese art during the first half of the 14th century.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 is at the National Gallery until June 22.

Louise Bourdua, Professor of Art History, University of Warwick

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