The Australian Grand Prix launches the 2026 Formula 1 (F1) season at Melbourne’s Albert Park on Sunday.

While the US strikes on Iran forced many teams to change their travel plans, organisers are confident the event will go ahead without a hitch.

There is plenty to look out for as the F1 world turns its attention towards Melbourne: the season-opening race is the first of a new era, with changes to technical regulations, while Australian Oscar Piastri is ready to challenge for the drivers’ championship as the crowd watches to see if he can break a lengthy drought on home soil.

Key changes to technical regulations

While the cars will look similar to last season’s, they will be vastly different.

The core aim of the new regulations is to make racing more competitive and increase passing.

Compared with 2025, this year’s cars are smaller, more agile and use more electric power.

The Drag Reduction System (DRS) – an adjustable rear wing device to promote overtaking – has been phased out after being introduced in 2011.

Active aero is now part of the regulations – not just a grey area that teams have tried to exploit.

Active aero allows drivers to change the position of the front and rear wing to produce high drag for cornering (increasing downforce, grip and braking performance), or low drag to deliver more speed on straights.

The biggest regulation changes apply to the power units. The cars will keep their 1.6 litre, turbocharged V6 engines, but the hybrid system will be rebalanced, resulting in a roughly equal split between combustion and electric power.

With almost three times greater electrical power (an increase from 120 kilowatts to 350kW) available, drivers will need to manage the battery charge and deployment.

The cars are smaller and lighter than last season, with the wheelbase reduced by 200 millimetres (to a maximum of 3,400mm), total width reduced by 100mm (1,900mm max), and minimum vehicle weight by 30 kilograms, down to 768kg.

These changes are designed to increase agility and encourage more overtaking opportunities.

Why F1 made these changes

Technical resets are part of the competitive lifecycle in F1.

F1 teams build and unveil a new car every season because technical regulations are updated, and because the pace of development means last year’s design is unlikely to be fast enough to be competitive.

Major technical regulation resets happen every few years and 2026 is one of those bigger shifts.

Changes to technical regulations can improve racing, increase opportunities for previously struggling teams, and ensure innovation stays at the forefront.

Each revision challenges engineers to interpret the regulations with limited data, enabling early innovators to gain a competitive advantage.

This unpredictability can reinvigorate fans’ appeal as new contenders emerge.

The 2026 changes are also aimed at supporting sustainability ambitions.

F1 has committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2030, and the use of sustainable fuels reflects this. These commitments could help inform the development of new technologies that find their way into road cars, too.

What will the racing look like?

The lighter, smaller cars may produce more dynamic racing, particularly on narrower street circuits where the smaller cars are more manoeuvrable.

The introduction of active aero should also add a tactical layer, as drivers adjust their wing settings to balance cornering grip and straight line speed.

The increased electrical output of the power units though have raised concerns from some, including four-time world champion Max Verstappen, that F1 racing might resemble Formula E.

Formula E cars run exclusively on battery electrical systems, making energy management central to race strategy: drivers must balance speed with battery conservation, often lifting off the throttle early to regenerate energy through braking.

With battery management, electrical regeneration and deployment all becoming more strategic than before, we will have to wait and see.

Piastri’s weight of expectation

After coming agonisingly close to winning the World Drivers’ Championship last season, the hopes of a nation hang with Piastri.

Australia has produced F1 world champions (Jack Brabham and Alan Jones) but has never produced a winner of the Australian Grand Prix.

Since its move from Adelaide (1985–95) to Albert Park in 1996, the Australian race has opened the F1 season on 23 occasions, meaning it has been the debut race for many drivers.

While many drivers have been successful in their home races – including German Michael Schumacher (four victories at Hockenheim), UK driver Lewis Hamilton (eight wins at Silverstone) and Verstappen from the Netherlands (three victories at Zandvoort) – none of these have coincided with the first race of a season and the implementation of new technical regulations.

Piastri will have to manage the weight of expectation combined with the demands of driving a new car under new regulations, adding a substantial psychological load in his pursuit of a home race win.

His calm and analytical approach to racing should position him well to find early performance in the new car.

But it’s not just about the driver – team performance and competitors’ adaptation will all play a role in whether Piastri is crowned champion at the end of the season.

The stage is set

So, the stage is set in Melbourne for the next chapter of F1, with Piastri Australia’s best title chance in recent times.

Changes to technical regulations rarely produce a predictable outcome. Drivers and teams go through periods of learning and experimenting to find performance.

The Australian Grand Prix is more than the start of a new season. It is the beginning of a new competitive landscape, where local fans will wait with bated breath to see whether Piastri can finally break the Australian GP hoodoo.

Dan van den Hoek, Senior Lecturer, Clinical Exercise Physiology, University of the Sunshine Coast; Anthony Bedford, Associate Professor of Data Science and Senior Performance Analyst, University of the Sunshine Coast, and Bridgette O'Malley, Associate Lecturer (Sport and Exercise Science), University of the Sunshine Coast

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

In 1981, a jingle played out across Australia, encouraging us to “Slip, Slop, Slap!”

In 2023, the jingle was added to the National Film & Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry in recognition of the way the tune – and its message – helped shape Australia.

But Slip, Slop, Slap! wasn’t the start of Australian skin cancer messaging. For that, we need to travel back to the 1930s.

What does going back in time tell us about our relationship to the sun? And how can history inform efforts to address the skin cancer conundrum?

Understanding the sun’s dangers

Although Indigenous Australians can suffer from skin cancers, their ancestors learned to live with the sun’s extremes, seeking shade in the hottest hours. When white woman Eliza Fraser was shipwrecked in 1836, local people treated her sunburn with sand, charcoal and grease.

Medical and popular understandings of skin cancer advanced slowly. In 1895, some thought cancer was contagious. Sydney’s Liverpool council debated whether sufferers should be confined to asylums or allowed freedom of the town.

In 1912, pioneering Melbourne dermatologist Herman Lawrence attributed skin cancer to constant exposure to the sun’s rays under Australia’s particular climatic conditions.

Sydney practitioner Norman Paul’s The Influence of Sunlight in the Production of Cancer of the Skin (1918) and the later Cutaneous Neoplasms (1933) were internationally renowned medical textbooks, furthering the medical argument for better sun protection.

From the 1920s, suntan (sometimes called “sunburn”) switched from a marker of working-class status to a social fad. Beauty parlour sunlamps along with the cosmetics industry played an increasing role as commercial determinants of health by promoting darker skin tones.

Sharing the news

Sporadic anti-tanning messaging in the press became more focused in the 1930s with encouragement from annual Commonwealth Department of Health cancer conferences.

New state-based anti-cancer organisations soon touted warnings to general practitioners, education departments and the general public, via pamphlets, bookmarks, fundraisers and health bulletins.

In the Medical Journal of Australia in 1932, Dr E.H. Molesworth encouraged wearing hats outdoors, confirming that ultraviolet rays in sunlight were a key cause of skin cancer. This message, moreover, was being shared far beyond the medical research community.

In 1930, the Queensland Cancer Trust issued an educational circular on skin cancer directed at hospitals, general practitioners, pharmacists and the broader public.

“The means of preventing Sun Cancer are simple,” it advised:

persons who are exposed to open sunlight should wear wide brimmed hats to protect the face, and should completely cover the rest of the skin.

Similar advice was disseminated during New South Wales Health Week in 1931, and the tendency for Australians to go outside in summer without a hat – dubbed the “no-hat habit” – came under scrutiny in newspapers from Perth to Rockhampton.

In the 1950s, “any change in a wart or a mole” became one of the seven danger signals of cancer, a headline feature in public health campaigns throughout Australia.

Subsequent decades saw skin cancer targeted with a succession of catchy phrases from “Don’t U.V.O.D.”, “Don’t turn your back on a mole” and “Kids cook quick” to “Save your own skin” and “Fry now pay later”.

But tanning continued to be a big part of Australian culture. Behavioural changes around sun protection were counteracted by longstanding messaging about sunlight and health and the postwar boom in beach culture and skimpier swimwear.

Moving forward

Public health campaigns improved skin cancer awareness but could lead to unintended outcomes. Australians turned to artificial means for their golden glow under the mistaken impression this was healthier than the sun’s rays.

In the 1970s, European tanning machines were introduced to Australians. Their importation may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle, but this is a good example of the complicated cultural factors behind behavioural change that belie the simple “bronzed Aussie” stereotype.

City solariums were part of the kit of a new generation of lifestyle centres that fostered clubbish exclusivity. Solarium tans became a marker of social competence and cosmopolitan aspiration, and Australians were slow to heed growing medical concern and cancer council warnings as to their harm.

In 2007, Clare Oliver spoke publicly about the dangers of solariums before her death from melanoma aged 26. Such a moving public example reinforced decades of warnings and gave momentum to stricter industry regulation and the eventual ban on commercial solariums by the mid 2010s.

The Commonwealth Department of Health began rating sunscreen effectiveness in the 1970s. Later studies, however, concluded that increased use could also lead sunbathers to “sunscreen abuse” by spending more rather than less time outdoors.

Slip, Slop, Slap! in 1981 and SunSmart, a skin cancer prevention program launched in 1988 to encourage sunscreen and wearing hats in schools, gained traction because they drew on good science. They were also able to repeat – but more importantly to translate – old messages for new generations.

The facts remain. Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. Two in three Australians will develop some form of skin cancer in their lifetime. Nearly 2,000 Australians die from skin cancer annually. Nearly one in four teens falsely believe a tan protects them against skin cancer.

Skin cancer messaging, now a century old, remains vitally important. Its task is never completed and its challenges are always changing. It will work most effectively when trust in science goes hand-in-hand with historical insight.

Andrew J. May, Professor of History, The University of Melbourne

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

Our beliefs aren’t fixed. They’re shaped, stretched and sometimes overturned by the ideas we encounter as we move through life. For many of us, novels are the moments where that shift happens.

For World Book Day, we asked ten academic experts to share a work of fiction that has challenged their assumptions and changed their thinking in a lasting way.

1. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (1968)

A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines showed me that my potential could not be defined by anyone but myself. The novel made me realise how easily labels from teachers and colleagues can become self-fulfilling. If you’re consistently told that you’re bad at something, you often end up believing it; like the main character Billy, and like myself, when my A-Level biology teacher told me I wouldn’t amount to anything in science and that I should quit.

Hines shows that potential isn’t determined by the people who underestimate you. Learning thrives when it is fuelled by passion and determination, and Billy’s dedication to training his kestrel Kes mirrored my own dedication to become a scientist.

The novel reminded me that the most meaningful growth happens when you trust your abilities more than the limitations other people put on you.

Anneliese Hodge is a PhD researcher in biological sciences

2. Beautiful World Where Are You? by Sally Rooney (2021)

Beautiful World Where Are You? follows the lives and loves of two friends for a period in their late 20s. It is the novel that changed my mind in relation to writing about sexual consent, at least, writing explicitly and positively about it.

I thought that consent was a subject rarely tackled by writers, unless to violate it or teach teenagers. In the latter case, it was usually done in a responsible style – not something stylish or sexy. Choosing a formative diet of 19th-century novels from the western canon undoubtedly biased my perceptions. Beautiful World shattered them. Its graphic sex scenes are peppered with the language of consent. Alright? OK? Can I? Do you want? Yes.

Rooney normalises seeking and giving clear, continuous consent, regardless of gender. Consent is integral to these scenes and part of the pleasure for characters and – if her bestseller status is any indication – readers.

Sarah Olive is a senior lecturer in English literature

3. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2004)

I grew up Roman Catholic in an all-boys school, and I first read Purple Hibiscus as a teenager, when faith was not a question but a climate of incense, rosaries and the quiet mathematics of guilt.

The novel follows Kambili, a Nigerian teenager navigating family, politics and belief under a father whose strict Catholicism masks violence and silence. One scene, in which he pours boiling water over her feet while praying for her soul, captures that terrible fusion of devotion and control.

Across the novel, Adichie unsettled me. I had assumed to question the church was to wound God. She showed me that devotion and questioning can live in the same breath, and that faith is deepened by honest attention rather than unexamined obedience.

This insight continues to shape my thinking about identity, scholarship and everyday moral life, including on African diaspora faith and international development.

Edward Ademolu is a lecturer in cultural competency

4. The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008)

The Years by Annie Ernaux changed my mind on how a life can be narrated.

Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute had already pushed the boundaries of autobiography in 1983 by splitting the narrating self and exposing the inconsistencies of memory. Ernaux masterfully continued along that path, showing how the images and memories that shape us are at once both personal and collective.

The book’s protagonist is approached through descriptions of photographs taken over the years by family members and others. These passages are interwoven with images, events and stories cutting across generations.

What emerges is a fragmented, patchwork portrait that is able to provoke the strongest emotions – immensely more than in a narration where the illusion of the singularity of a life is maintained. And this is probably because of its strange realism, allowing proximity through impersonality. Reading it, I encountered a life as an open space, a theatre of memory where I could wander, moving in and out, getting closer or just passing by.

Cecilia Benaglia is associate professor of French and comparative literature

5. Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future opened my eyes. Not only to the future reality of climate change, but it also made it clear to me that my naive belief that we could engineer our way out of the problem was very far from the truth.

I’d never read a more visceral description of what living and dying in a world ravaged by climate change would feel like. When the temperature climbs and we hit 100% humidity it’s simply impossible for the human body to cool itself, leaving the power grid straining to keep up with demand as those who can afford it attempt to stay alive with air conditioning.

Nothing short of a fundamental shift in what we value and how we act as a collective can get us close to avoiding the worst consequences of the climate crisis, and whichever way we choose the world will change beyond recognition. We just have to pick which path to follow.

Richard Sulley is a senior research fellow in sustainability policy

6. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

In Never Let Me Go, humans are farmed so their organs can be harvested by benefactors whenever needed. The book raises numerous moral questions but the core question for me is – how far will we go to meet a human need?

History suggests that we will damage our natural environment and destroy human lives, societies and even civilisations, to meet some human needs. We face this question now regarding technology such as AI and genetic engineering. They meet human needs of quick data processing or improved health outcomes, but present untold negative risks. Our activities around fossil fuels and minerals raise similar concerns.

This core question, raised by my reading of the novel, has shaped my career. It led me to leave a career in business to retrain as a philosopher so that I could combine business theory with philosophy. I now explore ways of continuing to innovate, but do so more awake to the potential harms and perhaps to make trade-offs that favour human dignity rather than economic progress alone.

Athol Williams is a senior fellow in strategy, leadership & ethics

7. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye had a deep impact on me. It changed how I understand racism. The novel shows that racism is not just built into institutions and systems. It also shapes how people see themselves and the world around them. In the book, whiteness is treated as the standard for everything – beauty, goodness, success, and even what it means to be fully human.

The novel details how Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl growing up in post-Great Depression Ohio, internalises anti-Black racism and develops a crippling inferiority complex through her desperate yearning to have blue eyes. The psychopathological effects of internalising anti-Black racism lead to Breedlove’s eventual insanity, which in a way constitutes her only protection from the misogynoir world.

What is further instructive about Morrison’s work is that it shows what literature, rather than highly technical theory, can do – connects us at a deeply emotional level, helping forge cultures of empathy and care.

Paul Giladi is a reader in philosophy

8. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)

Middlemarch calls itself a “study in provincial life”. It traces a picture of how – even in the 19th century – shifts in religion and science created complicated webs of human relationships.

I read the novel when I was 16, an age at which few people’s ideals are taken particularly seriously. Nevertheless, its central character, Dorothea, gave me a hugely formative model of an unapologetically clever, ardent woman shut out from formal education and struggling to find a meaningful channel for the intensity of her faith. Dorothea keeps searching for meaning, no matter how often she stumbles.

Middlemarch changed my mind by teaching me a kind of consolatory optimism: that whether we place our faith in religion or science, both can set us out “with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way”. To persist, we need “patience with each other and the world”.

Miranda Jane Mourby is a PhD candidate in law

9. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1966)

Back when I was 17, youthfully arrogant and thinking intelligence to be the only virtue worthy of measure, an unassuming sci-fi novel found me.

Flowers for Algernon is told through progress reports penned by the main character, Charlie. Charlie is born with a very low IQ, and is chosen to become the first human subject for an experimental treatment that enhances his IQ over time, eventually making him a genius. The treatment is not successful long term – and so what goes up must also come down.

Transhumanism is the philosophical movement in favour of transforming the human condition through technology, including enhancing cognitive abilities. Flowers for Algernon changed my naïve acceptance of the transhumanist core premises, as the novel forces you to ask instead: What makes intelligence good? Who is this enhancement for, and who does it benefit? How do we define what makes humans “better”?

In these days of tech billionaires investing in gene-editing and hailing the coming of artificial general intelligence, words from this novel still echo in my head: “Intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen is a fellow in AI and In/equality

10. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016)

Whenever I’m asked if I “live to work” or “work to live”, I think of the adage: “I do not dream of labour.” My position has been troubled once, namely by Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.

Murata’s novel follows Keiko, a convenience store worker who is socially shamed to leave her job and find a husband. Despite establishing a fake relationship with her workshy former colleague Shiraha, she still earns scorn from their respective families. Keiko ultimately leaves, determined to work at a convenience store again.

Initially, I was tempted to read this as a sad ending. Considering the novel’s critique of how society forces people into specific “norms” against their better judgement, I suddenly paused; was I missing the point?

This is not to say that the novel presents Keiko’s return to low-wage work as a fully positive thing. There is a gothic quality to Keiko’s view that she is a mere appendage of the store’s ecosystem. However, the ending made me consider: as a reader, was I adding to socially prescribed assumptions of what a “happy” ending might look like?

Lillian Hingley is a researcher and tutor in English

Has a novel ever changed your mind? Let us know in the comments below.

Anneliese Hodge, PhD Candidate, Ecotoxicology, Plymouth Marine Laboratory; Athol Williams, Lecturer in Management, University of Oxford; Cecilia Benaglia, Associate Professor, School of Modern Languages & Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick; Edward Ademolu, Lecturer in Cultural Competency, King's College London; Lillian Hingley, Postdoctoral Researcher in English Literature, University of Oxford; Miranda Jane Mourby, PhD Candidate, Law, University of Sheffield; Paul Giladi, Reader in Philosophy in the School of History, Religions and Philosophies, SOAS, University of London; Richard Sulley, Senior Research Fellow, Sustainability Policy, University of Sheffield; Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen, Academic Fellow in AI and In/equality, University of Sheffield, and Sarah Olive, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Aston University

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

Thomas Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was ahead of its time in more ways than one. Upon its publication, it provoked controversy with its explicit criticism of organised religion and traditional marriage, leading to book burnings and public criticism.

Hardy attributed the public criticism to his retirement from novel writing. He had already courted controversy in the literary establishment a few years earlier by describing the unmarried mother who (spoiler alert) goes on to commit murder at the centre of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) as “a pure woman”. But Jude the Obscure was his most searing attack yet on the hypocrisies of late Victorian society.

The novel’s apparent endorsement of free love, and damning portrait of conventional marriage, alienated many readers including – perhaps unsurprisingly – Hardy’s wife, with whom the novel caused an irreparable breach.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

There’s no getting away from it, the story is something of a downer. It’s the tale of a young man – the “obscure” Jude – whose life starts off hard and gets harder as he faces a string of obstacles in the pursuit of his dreams. And he is a dreamer.

The novel opens with a young Jude being introduced to the idea of a university education, as his beloved schoolteacher leaves him for the dreaming spires of Oxford (called Christminster in the novel). Gazing at the “mirage” of the cityscape on the horizon and captivated by the idea of this “beautiful city”, Jude is immediately cautioned by his guardian that it “is a place much too good for you”.

As the somewhat bleak title suggests, this is a story about alienation and social exclusion. Unperturbed by the ominous warnings, the working class Jude seeks to prepare himself for a university education by self-educating, using borrowed textbooks to teach himself Ancient Greek and Latin and studying diligently for many years.

As a young man, working as a stonemason in Christminster, Jude is determined to prove that universities are not, as he is told, “only for them with plenty o’ money”. He writes to the university, seeking advice on how to further his ambition of studying with them. The answer, when it comes, is crushing. Jude is advised that “as a working-man … [he] will have a better chance of success in life by remaining in [his] own sphere and sticking to [his] trade”.

In one of the most visceral images in the book, Jude responds by scrawling on the outside walls of the university: “I have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you.”

Sadly, this act of protest is still resonant today. As Jude understands, education is a path to social mobility. His impassioned defence of his own worth, as a scholar and as a human being, highlights the barriers faced by economically disadvantaged young people.

Inequality persists

In today’s society, it is unlikely that any hopeful student would receive such overt “stay in your lane” advice. Contemporary higher education aspires to a culture of widening participation, in which students from traditionally underrepresented groups are encouraged through outreach initiatives, contextual offers (in which applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds are given slightly lower grade requirements) and scholarships to apply to university.

Well-publicised schemes such as the Stormzy Scholarships, which seek to make University of Cambridge degrees more affordable for black students, have the explicit aim of redressing historical inequalities to make the university admissions process a more equitable system.

However, inequalities persist. Students from the poorest backgrounds are still drastically underrepresented at the UK’s most elite universities. Admissions statistics show that at Oxford, the object of Jude’s ambitions, applicants from fee-paying schools are more likely to be accepted than those from state schools.

Factor in, too, the increasingly eye-watering costs of living for students and, despite years of effort, the danger is that a university education remains the preserve of “them with plenty o’ money”.

As Hardy shows in the novel, the consequences can be devastating. While on a population level it results in stagnating social mobility, on a personal level the frustrations associated with the failure to fulfil your potential are profound, and the practical implications of being forced to remain in a position of economic dependence are severe.

Jude’s persistent reliance on the goodwill of others, and his struggles to provide for his growing family, all stem from his exclusion from the opportunity to raise his social position.

As his desperate scrawls on the walls of the university argue, access to higher education should be for those with merit, not money. Some 130 years on from the publication of Hardy’s novel, it seems work still needs to be done, lest we risk future generations falling into obscurity.

Beyond the Canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Shelley Galpin’s suggestion:

Like Jude the Obscure, Willy Russell’s Educating Rita (1980) is about education and the class system. In one scene, Rita, a working class Open University student from the north of England, has her books burned by her husband after he discovers she’s secretly been using contraception.

Watching Rita look on helplessly as her books and notes gradually succumb to the flames, as dramatised in the 1983 film, I vividly remember being moved to tears. I understood that Rita’s husband wasn’t just hindering her learning, he was telling her he didn’t want her to become an educated person, as he feared what education would give her.

At the heart of the play is a message that is too often lost in the current obsession with quantifiable measures of success and employability. That is, for some people, education is not merely a means to a qualification or a higher paying job. Education can be the end in itself.

Describing the book burning, Rita reflects on her husband’s failure to understand her studies, stating that her education is a chance to “breathe” and find herself. The value of this for anyone, although not easily measurable, can be profound.

While Jude’s barriers prove insurmountable, Rita’s is a more hopeful story. It stands as an impassioned argument for the significance and power of lifelong learning, and like Hardy’s novel before it, for the importance of accessible education.

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Shelley Galpin, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King's College London

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During the winter months, when days are short and cold and nights are long and dark, creating a warm and cosy indoor atmosphere can feel especially important.

Where I live in Denmark, around 75% of the population burns candles two or more times a week, and 34% use them daily during the winter months.

In fact, Denmark is often said to be the country with the highest per-capita candle consumption in Europe. Danes burn around 5.8kg of candle wax per person per year – the equivalent of about six bags of sugar.

Yet, nice as they can look, studies show burning candles is one of the biggest sources of indoor air pollution. This is because when burning, candles emit a large number of ultrafine particles.

These particles are so small that they are invisible to the human eye, and more than a thousand times thinner than a human hair. They can remain airborne for long periods, and when candles are blown out, the concentration of these particles (including soot) increases even further.

Candles vs cooking

In our experiments conducted in exposure chambers (where the climate is controlled) at Aarhus University, we examined how indoor air is affected both by burning candles and cooking pork in an oven.

Cooking – and especially frying – is known to emit high concentrations of particles due to combustion (the process of burning something). Particles from combustion processes are among the most harmful to human health – but less is known about the role that particles emitted from candles plays when it comes to indoor air pollution.

Our research found that while both candles and cooking emit high levels of particles, the number of particles from candles was much higher. Even more significant was the difference in particle size: cooking produced particles about 80 nanometers wide, whereas candles generated particles around seven-to=eight nanometers in size – much smaller and much easier for our lungs to inhale.

We also measured chemical compounds in the air, and found that burning candles produced not only soot particles but gases such as nitrogen dioxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) – a group of chemicals associated with inflammation and even cancer.

The particles we breathe

Ultrafine particles are of particular concern from a health perspective. They are easily inhaled into our lungs, but research has found they are excreted from the body very slowly.

Due to their extremely small size, particles from candles can penetrate deep into our smallest airways, known as the alveoli, and may even enter the bloodstream. From there, they can reach organs such as the heart and brain.

Indeed, the particles formed when candles are burning are remarkably similar to those found in diesel exhausts in size and composition. These particles have been linked to increased mortality rates from lung and cardiovascular diseases.

In our study, we also investigated how candle burning affects young adults with mild asthma. We found subtle but measurable biological changes following exposure to candle emissions.

Some markers of airway and blood inflammation were altered, and participants reported irritation and discomfort. Other studies among healthy adults have observed small decreases in lung function, changes in arterial stiffness and heart rate, and reduced cognitive function after exposure to burning candles.

Light and dark

You might be thinking: all this from just a candle? But it’s worth remembering that people with chronic conditions like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are far more sensitive to particulate air pollution.

Because people with these conditions already have chronically inflamed airways, even relatively low levels of pollution — including particles released by burning candles — can be enough to trigger symptoms.

Children, older adults and people with chronic illnesses are also particularly vulnerable to air pollution, due to immaturity of their lungs or weakened immune systems.

Indeed, for anyone with asthma or other respiratory conditions, the quality of indoor air is not a minor detail, but a key factor in day-to-day symptom control and long-term respiratory health.

Blow out all the candles?

But that’s not to say those without lung disease or asthma aren’t affected. As research shows, burning candles affects not only the indoor environment but potentially everyone’s health. Fortunately, a few simple steps can help maintain a healthier indoor climate.

Try using LED candles, for example, or light only a few candles at once. You should also place candles away from drafts to avoid a flickering flame, which can produce more soot and smoke. Trim your candles’ wicks to reduce soot formation, too. And candles should never be burned near (or by) people with respiratory disease.

Most importantly, air out the room afterwards by opening your windows. Such measures can help reduce the number of particles significantly, and make all the difference when it comes to keeping your cosy or hygge-time healthy.

Karin Rosenkilde Laursen, Postdoctoral fellow in Public Health, Aarhus University

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

Roughly 425 million years ago, in the warm seas over what is now southern China, there lived a metre-long bony fish with jaws full of clusters of spiky teeth.

Long extinct, this predatory fish (Megamastax amblyodus) was an ancient forerunner of all animals with a skeleton and a backbone alive today – including you and me – and was the world’s oldest known vertebrate apex predator that lived at the top of the food chain in its environment.

In a new paper published in Nature today, we report the discovery of a remarkable new fossil of this strange creature.

This fossil gives us an unprecedented view into the early evolution of bony fishes, and fills a key gap in our understanding of the evolution of vertebrate diversity seen on Earth today.

The dawn of bony fishes

Bony fish are known as osteichthyans. They make up around 98% of all vertebrate species on Earth.

By the end of the Silurian Period (419.2 million years ago) the osteichthyans had branched into two main lineages: the Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes) and Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fishes and limbed tetrapods, including humans).

Until recently, our knowledge of the very earliest bony fishes (stem-osteichthyans) that branched off before that great split was restricted to tantalising fragments from Silurian and Early Devonian rocks, giving only the briefest glimpse into their bizarre anatomy.

Megamastax: the early discoveries

We first described Megamastax in 2014 based on isolated jaw bones from the Kuanti Formation of Yunnan in southern China.

The largest jaw would have been 17 centimetres long when complete, suggesting an animal roughly one metre long that was – and still is – the largest known jawed fish from the Silurian period. While there were sharp, conventional teeth on the biting margins of the mouth, the inner surface of the lower jaw displayed a row of big semicircular “lumps” unlike anything seen before.

We identified these as an inner row of large blunt teeth, presumably for crushing armoured prey, and so named the new fossil Megamastax amblyodus – the “big mouth with blunt teeth”.

‘Big mouth’ gets a makeover

We hoped to find more fossils of this fish in subsequent field trips to Yunnan. But nothing prepared us for what turned up just few years later: a complete skull and jaws that revealed a creature far weirder than we could have ever imagined.

The skull was long and narrow, with small eyes and a huge mouth with a sharply hooked snout. The anatomy was an odd mosaic of features associated with many different vertebrate groups.

On the one hand, the cheeks and gill covers were typical for an early bony fish. But other features were strikingly similar to the strange Silurian fish [Entelognathus], which was a type of “placoderm” (a group of extinct armoured fish) that lived at the same time. One such feature was the configuration of the bones on the skull roof which are singular instead of paired.

In most bony fishes, the paired bones at the front of the mouth are simple structures that sit flat against the front of the snout. But in Megamastax and Entelognathus, these bones also had broad horizontal shelves that extended into the roof of the mouth.

High-resolution scans revealed internal features which were unusual for a bony fish. The way the braincase extended far backwards was once again similar to Entelognathus, while the major arteries branched at the back of the skull in a manner identical to early shark relatives.

A mouth full of pincushions

Inside the mouth, we learned the truth of those strange lumps on the original lower jaw.

The new skull showed complementary rows of lumps on the roof of the mouth. Also present were odd little circular structures that, in life, would have slotted onto these lumps, each topped with a cluster of sharp fangs.

So those mysterious lumps were not teeth at all, but the mounting points for bony tooth cushions.

Tiny isolated tooth cushions had previously been found with Lophosteus and Andreolepis, two fragmentary bony fish from the Silurian period in Europe. These were originally interpreted as being associated with the gills, but it was also suspected they may have instead been a kind of tooth plate. But how they fit into the mouth was a mystery.

Megamastax finally answers this and reveals these cushions were widely distributed at the base of the bony fish radiation, but were lost in the common ancestor of the ray-fins and lobe-fins.

So instead of having a few blunt teeth for cracking armour, Megamastax instead had a mouth filled with clusters of piercing fangs for snagging softer-bodied prey. However, it was a vastly larger fish than any other animal in its habitat and could likely devour most of them regardless of armour.

It was likely the earliest vertebrate apex predator in the fossil record.

A complementary find

The new skull of Megamastax is one of two new major Chinese fossil discoveries.

The other is Eosteus chongqingensis (by a different team of authors), a tiny 3cm long bony fish from the famous 435 million year old Huixingshao Formation, Chongqing.

This find complements the outstanding cranial detail of Megamastax in preserving the whole body and fins. At over 10 million years older than Megamastax, this is the earliest osteichthyan in the fossil record.

The great-uncle of all living bony vertebrates

With only jaws, it was hard to pinpoint where Megamastax sat within the osteichthyan family tree.

We previously suggested it could be a primitive lobe-finned fish. But the new skull revealed it to be something else. Our new family tree moves it closer to the great split, but above all the other stem-osteichthyans in the analysis.

If correct, then Megamastax is the closest known form to the common ancestor of the ray-finned and lobe-finned fishes.

This new skull bridges the gap between placoderms and bony fishes. In revealing the anatomical “default settings”, Megamastax provides a template for exploring when and how the osteichthyans acquired key features – a journey that would ultimately lead to their incredible modern diversity.

Brian Choo, Postdoctoral Fellow in Vertebrate Palaeontology, Flinders University and Jing Lu, PhD Candidate, Evolutionary Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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

University can be a time of great opportunities, but it can also be very stressful. Many students need to support themselves financially and may be living away from home. Students are also under constant deadlines and, if in their final years, need to prepare for life and work after uni.

My colleagues and I research how students can succeed and thrive in their studies.

So, as classes begin for semester one, how can you be proactive about your wellbeing and find a healthy balance between work, study and friends?

Academic and personal wellbeing

There are two interconnected parts of life that are particularly challenged at university. These are academic wellbeing and personal wellbeing.

Academic wellbeing is about your learning and achievement, and how motivated and engaged you are with your studies. Personal wellbeing is about your mental health, self-esteem, life satisfaction and sense of meaning and purpose.

This is where “buoyancy” – sometimes called everyday resilience – comes in. Buoyancy is students’ ability to bounce back from challenges, difficulties and setbacks. It helps them navigate the ups and downs of university life, from competing deadlines, to exam stress and the demands of paid work.

In our research, we have identified psychological and interpersonal ways to help students maintain their academic and personal wellbeing. We call them “the 6 Cs of buoyancy”.

1. Confidence

We have found students who believe in themselves to do what they set out to do tend to respond well to difficulty. Boosting self-belief, or confidence, involves two important things.

• Focus on the positives: recognise what knowledge and skills you already have. Avoid negative thinking traps. For example, give yourself credit for positive results instead of thinking the “lecturer went easy on me”.

• Develop a broader view of success: view success not just in terms of marks, but also in terms of learning new things and personal improvement. This helps you recognise more of the things you do well, so you receive confidence-boosters more often.

2. Control

Our research shows students who feel as though they are “in the driver’s seat” are not as easily affected by adversity. There are two helpful ways you can feel in control.

• Focus on the three things in your control: these are effort (how hard you try), strategy (the way you try) and attitude (what you think of yourself and the challenge).

• Seek out feedback: this is information or ideas about how to navigate a challenge or improve next time. You can get this from teachers, a student advisor or trusted peers.

3. Commitment

Staying focused on your goals can help you persist through tough times. There are two ways to support this.

• Set clear goals and a plan for meeting them: so you know what you’re doing, why, and how to do it.

• Seek support: remember there are people who can help you if you are unsure about something, such as academic staff and student support services.

4. Coordination

Having a clear plan also helps you to navigate your way through challenges. There are two ways to do this:

• Look ahead: what challenges are on the horizon? Are there assignment deadlines on the same day? Be proactive and get onto them early so you finish them by the due date.

• Have a timetable: make a realistic and achievable weekly timetable so you can balance the different things you need and want to do.

5. Composure

Academic anxiety typically involves worrying excessively about poor results, performance in an upcoming test or presentation, meeting deadlines and getting on top of difficult coursework. Managing your academic anxiety is an important part of maintaining academic and personal wellbeing.

• Have stress management and relaxation strategies: find strategies that work for you. This may be meditation, exercise, reading or connecting with nature.

• Make lifestyle adjustments: create healthy habits, such as an improved diet, less alcohol, more sleep or staying off social media channels that “wind you up”.

6. Connection

A sense of belonging is a buffer against stress. Good relationships are also a protective factor in tough times.

• Get more involved: participate in classes, labs and tutorials. Say “yes” to social opportunities such as a coffee after a lecture. Look for a university club or society you can join. Go into uni a little more than being online.

• Keep in touch: socialise with good friends from school or other parts of life outside of uni.

What if I am struggling?

The 6 Cs are helpful for navigating day-to-day challenges at university. But it is important to reach out to a mental health professional on or off campus if you need more support.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Andrew J. Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology, UNSW Sydney

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

Whether you whistle or not, you can’t escape whistlers. They’re dog owners, construction workers, day dreamers, concertgoers and annoying sports fans whose shrill makes you wish for earplugs.

And there are tradies – Snow White’s pesky disciples who think whistling while you work makes chores fun. (Disclaimer: It didn’t work for my taxes.)

Admittedly, whistling can be useful for silencing noisy crowds and hailing taxis New York-style, but be mindful of the social rules. You can whistle admiringly at a flashy car, but you’ll be fined up to 750 euros for sexual harassment if you wolf whistle at women publicly in France.

Whistlers in history

Whistling is a common human skill. For centuries, shepherds and goat herders used whistling to summon livestock and direct dogs to steer the herds. The whistling sound can travel ten times further than shouting, which makes it ideal for long distance communication in rural areas.

Long ago, remote communities in Turkey and Mexico developed a whistled version of their spoken languages for communicating across the countryside. As linguist Julien Meyer explains, each syllable of a word translated to a whistled melody, allowing neighbours to talk across vast distances. Whistled languages are still in use today in places like La Gomera in the Canary Islands.

Whistling featured prominently in the development of the recording industry. Historian Tim Brooks recounts how Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention, the phonograph, drew public curiosity but the sound quality of recorded voice was too weak to show off the machine’s potential.

Shrill whistling, however, could be reproduced perfectly, which likely sustained public interest through the phonograph’s early modifications. Brooks traced the transformation of George W. Johnson from a whistling street performer at a ferry terminal to New York recording artist at the birth of the recording industry.

Decades later, whistling continued leaving musical marks in the industry. Notable examples include Roger Whittaker’s intricate The Mexican Whistler, Otis Redding’s layback ending to The Dock of the Bay, Bobby McFerrin’s cheerful Don’t Worry, Be Happy, and Maroon 5’s distinctive opening to Moves Like Jagger.

Today, there’s even a market for complete whistling albums like from Molly Lewis. But few recordings are as memorable as the 1966 Spaghetti Western theme song The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It made whistling iconic for showdowns.

How whistling works

Whistling is produced when small pockets of air spinning at your lips interact with spaces in your mouth. Puckering your lips and whistling with fingers use the same principles.

Musical sound is produced when something, such as a guitar string, vibrates. Vibrations create pressure in the air which moves outwards in waves. When we whistle, the air itself becomes the vibrator. What happens next makes it audible.

Different spaces affect a sound wave’s energy as it passes through. Some cavities dampen the energy, while others excite it by swirling around making the cavern itself vibrate or resonate. That’s what makes whistling louder.

To experience the power of resonance, try singing in a bathroom with lots of towels, then remove the towels and sing again. The extra ring you’ll hear is the effect of resonance.

Whistling works by fine-tuning the speed of your breath with the size, shape and tension in your lips and tongue so the space rings.

Learning to whistle

Unfortunately, knowing the physics doesn’t make whistling easier. Learning requires coordinating your senses with how you move your body. You create a learning loop where your brain connects your mouth and breath movement with what you hear, feel and see when you whistle.

Simply put, you use trial and error to figure which actions help amplify the sound and which don’t.

Whistlers aren’t born. They’re made. If you find whistling hard, then you’ll need to practice isolating and moving all the parts in an epic Gollum-like quest for the precious ring.

Top tips for whistling pucker-style:

• find a quiet room

• wet your whistle – water on your lips helps

• push your lips forward to make a small, firm hole; a mirror can help you see what you’re doing

• breathe out with a steady air stream

• listen to the sound and experiment with your tongue tip position (forward, backwards, higher, lower), lips shape (tightened, relaxed, wider, pushed forward, pulled sideways), and breath stream (faster, slower) – you should hear subtle changes, even if it just sounds like wind

• play around until you find one position where the sound seems louder than others

• make micro adjustments in the position to find which movements increase the ring

• repeat all steps daily so your brain learns to find your whistle automatically and tune it.

Failing that, take up singing. It’s easier and you won’t look like you’re kissing a ghost.

Wendy Hargreaves, Academic in the School of Education and Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland

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

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of people who have died.

Much of the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) and Indigenous peoples focuses on harms, such as cultural appropriation, cultural flattening and digital exclusion. These risks are real.

But behind them sits an assumption that rarely gets challenged: because Aboriginal cultures are ancient, they must be static. Rooted firmly in the past, to stay there. That they cannot adapt to something as disruptive as generative AI.

This misreads tens of thousands of years of history. And it misses something our work with Traditional Owners in the Kimberley in Western Australia has made increasingly clear: Indigenous cultures are not only capable of adapting to AI – the way they have always held and transmitted knowledge may make them natural users of it.

‘Say it properly’

When I (Liz) first began working with Wororra people in the Kimberley, the late Janet Oobagooma taught me Wororra words. A senior cultural Elder for the Dambimangari community, she was exacting. When I got tongue-tied, she would growl at me: “If you’re gonna talk, say it properly”.

That strictness is structural, not personal. Wororra is an oral language. There is no written form to fall back on.

All societal laws, historical records, kinship information and cultural practices accumulated over millennia must be held in living memory – encoded across an entire population in songs, mythology, art, dance and ceremony. Nothing is filed in a single place. Everything is distributed, collectively maintained, and must be practised to survive.

This is fundamentally different from Western text-based, institutionalised knowledge systems.

And it raises a practical question: if oral knowledge was never meant to be read off a page, are libraries and archives really the best way to return it to the communities it belongs to?

Locked away in archives

The renowned Wororra lawman Sam Woolagoodja – co-author Francis Woolagoodja’s grandfather – worked with anthropologists, filmmakers and linguists over decades. Among them were missionary linguist Howard Coate, filmmaker Michael Edols, and bush adventurer Malcolm Douglas, who filmed Sam repainting Wandjina rock art at Raft Point.

Over more than 40 years Sam shared cultural knowledge with these researchers. The recordings, field notes and translations captured during this period contribute some of the most detailed documentation of Wororra culture in existence.

Today, this material sits in institutions across the country, thousands of kilometres from the communities it belongs to.

This isn’t only a matter of preservation. For Aboriginal corporations managing Country, this data informs modern governance. Genealogies determine who speaks for Country. Heritage records shape native title decisions – as traditional owners have said to each other in management forums: “people are making up their own story about us”.

What AI made possible

Working with Sam’s descendants, we set out to gather his legacy of archived cultural material and explore ways to return it to community.

We began using a generative AI tool – Claude, made by Anthropic – to assist in making sense of data provided to Howard Coate by Sam.

We used it for deciphering difficult handwriting in decades-old field notebooks, cross referencing genealogies across multiple sources, and organising hundreds of extracted PDF scans into usable files. Work that normally takes months could be completed in hours.

But the real shift came when we began directing the AI to work only within a defined set of curated sources – published research, verified archival material, community-approved records – rather than drawing from the open internet.

Within that controlled environment, we could ask questions about Wororra culture in plain language and receive grounded answers drawn only from material we trusted.

It became a way of learning through dialogue rather than reading dense academic text. For those of us working to understand a culture’s depth from scattered published sources, it accelerated learning dramatically.

This experience gave us an idea. If a curated AI environment could help researchers engage with cultural knowledge through conversation, could a purpose-built system do the same for community members – especially younger generations living in town, away from Country?

The limitations of AI

General-purpose AI still has serious limitations. It has no understanding of cultural protocols or Indigenous data sovereignty, no concept of restricted knowledge governed by gender, age or ceremonial authority.

It can present errors with complete confidence, mixing up sources, misattributing cultural information, or presenting guesswork as fact. In heritage work, accuracy is not optional.

So we are developing a purpose-built concept. A closed-system AI governed by the community, where sources are verified, culturally appropriate and collectively endorsed.

The intent is not to replace oral tradition but to give communities a way to interact with their heritage through dialogue using AI. That’s closer to how this knowledge was always meant to be used than any library shelf or academic paper.

Janet Oobagooma and the Elders who contributed to the Dambimangari community’s published history, Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee (“we are telling all of you”), always emphasised that culture is not a museum exhibit.

It is alive, it adapts, and it demands to be spoken. AI is just the latest tool that could help make that happen – if communities are the ones holding it.

Elizabeth Vaughan, Rock Art Australia Kimberley Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia and Francis Woolagoodja, Dambimangari Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge

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

The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup is the first major women’s soccer tournament Australia has hosted since the groundbreaking 2023 Women’s World Cup.

The 12-team event, which will be held in Perth, Sydney and the Gold Coast, started on Sunday with the Matildas winning their first match against the Philippines. They next play Iran on Thursday night.

The tournament also doubles as a qualifier for the 2027 Women’s World Cup and represents a chance for the Matildas to win a major tournament on home soil.

While there will no doubt be huge interest in the tournament, particularly if the Matildas continue to do well, it is also an opportunity to look at the challenges facing women’s sport in general and women’s soccer in particular in the lead-up to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

The impact of the 2023 World Cup

The 2023 Women’s World Cup was the largest major women’s sport event Australia has (co-)hosted.

It marked a significant moment in women’s sport in Australia.

It provided a space so welcoming that many self-described sports haters and fans alienated by the hypermasculinity of men’s sports were drawn to it.

It delivered a socially contagious collective experience that was diverse, representative, and feel-good.

It also showed investing in women’s sport is good business.

With more than 1.75 million tickets sold and with television audience figures exceeding even those of the AFL grand final and NRL’s State of Origin, the 2023 tournament set new benchmarks for women’s sport’s visibility and commercialisation.

The Matildas are now one of Australia’s most recognisable and marketable national sports brands. They sell out match after match, outsell Socceroos jerseys 2:1 and have commanded the “Matildas effect” – a byword for perception- and participation-changing influence and gender equality advancement.

The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup, which for the first time features its own mascot and with it accompanying engagement and merchandise opportunities, will want to leverage and extend that inclusiveness, brand and market.

More work needs to be done

While the Matildas specifically and women’s sport internationally – from basketball to ice hockey – have become more popular and more profitable, that hasn’t translated domestically.

The A-League women’s competition suffered a 26% attendance decline in 2024–25 and underinvestment in the league means players are unable to secure full-time, year-round employment.

While outlier top-tier Australian soccer players earn high salaries, 39% of women athletes don’t earn anything from sport.

A 2025 report from Australian soccer’s player development program showed many athletes are struggling with challenges around disordered eating, alcohol and anxiety.

Women coaches also experience more adversity than men.

At a policy and advocacy level, the country’s sole Office for Women in Sport and Recreation has been disbanded by the Victorian government, and Australia still lacks a national strategy for women’s sport.

Bridging the national team-domestic league gap will be front of mind for administrators during and beyond the Women’s Asian Cup to ensure sustainability.

Areas for improvement

There will be no increase to Women’s Asian Cup prize money at the 2026 tournament – it will remain at US$1.8 million (A$2.55 million) shared between the top four teams, the same as 2022.

Compare this with the US$14.8 million ($A21 million) allocated to the men in 2023.

That 88% prize money gap signals much work still needs to be done to facilitate equality.

Media coverage is similarly lagging. While it has increased from the box-ticking “one and done” media coverage of the past, it remains largely event-based.

Social media is plugging the major media gap, raising players’ profiles and providing transformative engagement but it often entails unpaid labour to maintain an online presence.

It also exposes athletes to greater levels of online abuse.

Opportunities on and off the pitch

The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup represents a chance to prove the hype around women’s soccer is more than a one-time thing. Simultaneously, it needs to avoid counterproductive “boom time, again” narratives that emerge about every decade espousing that women’s sport has “made it”.

It also represents an opportunity to take women’s soccer in Australia to the next level.

Despite the Matildas developing a huge fan following and demonstrating much promise, not since the 2010 Asian Cup has the team been able to bring home a trophy.

The 2006 and 2010 Asian Cups (when Australia finished runners-up and champion respectively) showed the Matildas could compete.

The 2023 Women’s World Cup showed the world there was a market.

This year’s Women’s Asian Cup represents a chance to bring the two together as the Matildas seek to realise their potential and ensure sustainability by both filling stadiums and bringing home silverware.

It is a significant opportunity for the team to show it can win both off and on the pitch.

Fiona Crawford, Adjunct Lecturer at the Centre for Justice, Queensland University of Technology

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

On paper, the Matildas should have a major advantage playing on home soil for the upcoming Women’s Asian Cup.

However, from a sleep and travel perspective, they may be fighting a hidden disadvantage despite Australia hosting the tournament, which runs from March 1–21.

This is because most of Australia’s squad is based overseas, many flying from the top European leagues in England, Italy, Germany and Sweden.

Let’s unpack the challenges they face and how travel impacts these athletes.

How flying impacts sleep

The human body runs on an approximate 24-hour internal timing system known as the circadian rhythm.

This body clock regulates when we feel alert, when we feel sleepy and even how well we perform.

Therefore, when a team travels from Southwest or Central Asia to Australia, the players may shift forward up to 6–7 hours.

Let’s take, for example, the Iranian national team, almost all of whom play in the local domestic league. For staff and players travelling from Tehran to Brisbane, their internal body clocks will still think it’s the middle of the night when it’s morning in Brisbane.

The result is jet lag: a misalignment between the internal body clock and the new time zone, which generally resolves at about one day per time zone crossed.

Jet lag results in disrupted sleep, daytime fatigue, slower reaction times and reduced concentration.

In travelling to Australia, nations such as Iran and Uzbekistan will cross five or more time zones, others such as Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea will face only minor shifts.

But the Matildas, Japan and South Korea have many players arriving from various European countries.

The Matildas have the most overseas-based players of any squad (closely followed by Japan). The Australians have 23 players arriving into Perth from all different locations: 13 from England, four from Sweden, two from Italy, two from Germany, one from the United States and one from Canada.

The distance of travel matters. Long-haul flights can disrupt sleep even before jet lag begins.

Athletes often struggle to sleep on planes due to restricted movement, cabin pressure, dehydration and unfamiliar conditions.

They can suffer what is known as travel fatigue, which is different from jet lag.

So some teams will arrive in Australia only sleep-deprived (travel fatigue, minor shifts), and some will arrive both sleep-deprived as well as circadian-misaligned (jet lag).

Direction matters

The severity of symptoms and rate of adaptation largely depend the direction of the flight and the individual variation.

Travel to Australia can take up to 30 hours in the less favourable eastward direction.

To put it simply, recovering from eastward travel usually requires people to shift their sleep and wake up earlier.

Physiologically, this is harder than travelling west because advancing the body clock affects the body more than delaying it.

Why some players adapt faster

Not everyone responds to travel in the same way.

Adaptation to time-zone change is moderated by chronotype – natural preferences of the body for sleep and wake activities.

Morning types (larks) feel alert early and are ready for bed earlier while evening types (owls) prefer later schedules.

These differences are important because morning types may adapt better to eastward travel.

Evening types often struggle more because they must fall asleep earlier than their biological preference. Exposure to bright light at the wrong time (such as scrolling on a phone in a brightly lit hotel room) may further delay adjustment.

That’s why screening players’ natural sleep patterns before a tournament can help staff individualise plans.

Experience counts. Players who regularly compete in international tournaments are repeatedly exposed to long-haul travel and rapid time-zone changes where overtime they often develop different behavioural strategies to help reduce the severity of jet lag symptoms.

Sleep banking and light exposure

One of the simplest and most effective strategies is something called sleep banking.

In the week before departure, players can deliberately extend their nightly sleep by 30–60 minutes. This creates a buffer against the inevitable sleep loss during travel and competition.

Research shows this can minimise performance declines and speed-up recovery later, especially when going into periods of disrupted sleep.

In short, we can’t eliminate jet lag but we can prepare for it.

Once in Australia, timing becomes everything.

The timing of light exposure after eastward travel becomes ever more important. Evening light should be limited.

Short daytime naps (20–60 minutes, ideally early afternoon) can reduce fatigue without impairing night-time sleep.

Caffeine can be helpful but only when timed carefully: a sneaky late-afternoon coffee may impact subsequent sleep and potentially delay adaptation.

Sleep as a competitive advantage

In tournament football, sleep should be viewed as a performance variable that underpins both preparation and recovery.

Athletes’ sleep is commonly disrupted after competition, particularly night games.

In a tournament context, this creates a compounding problem: one poor night can carry into subsequent matches via reduced recovery, impaired mood and vigilance, and altered physiological readiness.

Multi-match schedules, short turnarounds, late kickoffs, unfamiliar beds and heightened cognitive arousal can all compress sleep opportunity and reduce sleep quality at the very time when athletes need it most.

The goal isn’t perfect sleep – it is consistency and protecting one’s sleep opportunities. Teams must make sleep a priority and stop stealing it through poorly timed meetings, recovery sessions or media obligations.

Prioritising sleep and recovery could be the difference between falling at the group stages of the tournament and pushing deep into the final matches.

Michele Lastella, Senior Lecturer, CQUniversity Australia; Dean J. Miller, Senior Lecturer, Appleton Institute, HealthWise Research Group, CQUniversity Australia; Jacopo Vitale, Group Head at LUdeS University, Switzerland, and Matthew Driller, Associate Professor, Sport and Exercise Science, La Trobe University

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